Drop Down Menu

Would a drop down menu hurt rankings on Google?

[herd4598]

I want to add a drop down menu with all of the links within it going to my dynamic shopping cart pages. Would such a drop down menu dilute the value of my in-site links to my static pages? Also, would a a drop down menu prevent google from crawling the whole page or confuse the crawler in some way?

thanks

[Raymond]

If you are using a form, for sure google will not spider those pages, considering that no other pages are linking to those pages.

For javascript menu, I am not 100% sure. Though, it is pretty safe to say that google will ignore those pages as well.

[buddhu]

If you want to use drop down or JavaScript nav there's no real reason not to as long as you also have a plain hypertext sitemap bearing links to all your pages. This must be linked to from all your pages, and all links should be plain text hyperlinks. That gives the spiders an alternative route through your site, leaving you free to use whatever kind of nav you like for your visitors.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Buddhu what a great, easily understood reply. I wish all contributors could be as clear as you.

[petehall]

It depends what sort of drop down menu you mean. A drop down form element would not be much use!

I use layer menus on all of the sites I work on and they work really well in search engines.

Do not rely on JavaScript to create the menus and hyperlinks - make sure they are coded in HTML (as a normal hyperlink would be), and Google will index your pages with success.

As long as you only use JavaScript for animating / showing / hiding menus and not for creating them you will be fine.

[herd4598]

Sorry but I am not familair with all of these terms. Will the links within the drop down menu created from this tool be counted in google?

[free-webmaster-tools.com...]

[oshatz]

I always wonder if using a drop-down menu made of hidden layers is a smart move. One might assume that search engines may not understand that the hidden layers are a part of a menu, and treat them as hidden text. And of course, hidden text is a big no-no.

Oren

[Lorel]

I use a drop down menu on two sites including my own that utilizes HTML, CSS and Javascript and therefore Google can read it. It's called the MyGosuMenu. Here is the site of the developer.

[gosu.pl...]

Lori

[petehall]

I always wonder if using a drop-down menu made of hidden layers is a smart move. One might assume that search engines may not understand that the hidden layers are a part of a menu, and treat them as hidden text. And of course, hidden text is a big no-no.
Oren

As long as the "hidden text" serves a real purpose for the user (i.e. a menu of valid, visible links), then I can't see any harm in them.

Without JavaScript the layers / links are 100% visible anyway, as JavaScript does the "hiding" as the page is rendered by a browser.

In my opinion, there is little or no risk at all using this method.