Forum Moderators: open
René.
You can also put text links at the bottom of all your pages that match the scrollover ones that you expect people to use. Unless you have a huge site itt is not obtrusive and for people like me who don't like scrollovers it offers me a navigation I prefer. :-)
My questions would be, would making those links invisible (for navigational purposes) be looked upon as spamming, since technically the links are invisible (but are able to become visible).
Shouldn't this site be penalized for having hidden links?
When SEs talk about "hidden links" what they usually mean are those that are not visible to normal site visitors and are just there for the SEs to follow, such as a 1x1 invisible gif. Or, as has been noted elsewhere, when "Very Big Lodging Site Dot Com" links from a period -- that's a "." -- to a page of links to about fifty somewhat spammy sites. Those are no-nos.
Any legitimate use of legitimate technologies won't -- or shouldn't -- be penalized. But you might unintentionally hurt yourself. Seindal's right, use a plainly labeled site map. Whether you can do it in one page or need a group of pages most spiders will eat this up 'cause you're basically making it easy and doing their job for them.
We started with a site map from the git go when we were using dynamic menus and still use them since we scrapped that navigation (Absolutley, positively cross-browser compatible. Yeah, right!). Every one of our 1,400 content pages is visited by each of the major spiders on a regular basis. You can't ask for much more. And it's easy.
Jim
Let's say I sell widgets. I sell all kinds of widgets, basically around 12 categories of widgets (which would be my main buttons). Well each of these categories has sub categories as well (some as many as 10). Our left hand nav got so large and long on the side (because we were showing all cats and sub cats) that I'm looking for something new.
Do whatever you want with your main navigation as long as it is good for you and your visitors. Use dynamic CSS or Java applets, collapsible or fold out menus. There's a lot of sources out there for different menu systems, Netscape has a couple of supposedly cross-browser CSS menus, Project Seven as mentioned above has some very nice stuff.
The object though is for Google and other SEs to get to your pages (and, for arguments sake, for those visitors with older browsers or with Java disabled). Even for 1,400 pages it's really simple -- we just don't try to list every page in the site maps. Sounds counter to my argument but makes it much easier to manage.
Each site map page carries a menu with our main sections. Each main section page lists the main topic pages in that section. That's it for the site maps. We just then make sure that each page of our topic groups is thoroughly interlinked within that group.
So, "Widgets Happenings" might include "Widget Happening 1" thru "Widget Happening 24." The main "Widget Happening 1" page and all other detail pages within that are interlinked, say an info page and schedule pages for each month.
Just throw a "Site Map" link on the bottom of your home page or the footer on every page and you'll never have a problem. If you're going to use something the spiders can't read you have to.
Of course, it doesn't do much good if the 1,410 pages that Google has indexed are all PR0, but that's another story.
Jim
