DHTML menus, spiders & SERPS

Safe To Use, or Still Risky?

[COlarry]

I've been playing with the leading dhtml menu product and have some nice dhtml menus on a test version of my home page. I do not under any circumstances want to jeopardize my #1 rankings in competitive searches. (medium size content site with good PR)

From those in the know, is it likely safe to use well-coded cross-browser compatible dhtml in menuing these days? I think in old days, the spiders did not like these, right?

Any assessments appreciated!

[DrDoc]

Does the menu still work and make sense with JavaScript turned off? If so, then the SE is likely not to mind it. The only thing that will be held against you in that case is the amount of code bloat added by the actual script itself.

However, in general all sorts of fancy JS/DHTML stuff is neither SE, nor user friendly. It may look good if you ask a tech geek, but the average user will find it overly hard/complex to use, or will simply find that it malfunctions for whatever reason.

Use JS and DHTML, but use it sparingly. And whenever you do decide to use it, use it to enhance functionality, not replace the basic functionality which was already there. Your users care more about whether it works than how it works.

[isitreal]

If the dropdown menu is physically on your page, ie, not written out by javascript (like a list with visibility off through CSS), it doesn't really matter as far as search engines are concerned, since it's just more code on the page to follow. What does matter is that the dropdown code is fairly lean, most commercial versions I've seen are about 30-50 kB large, that's 10 seconds roughly over dialup modem, and about 10-15 times larger than required to create that functionality, see for example blobfisks dropmenu here [webmasterworld.com].

Of course, your site's functionality shouldn't ever depend on anything javascripted, so the dropdown menu options should just be an aid to users. In other words, make sure that the navigation items present on the drop down menu are also always available on the target page, hardcoded in somewhere so users without javascript can still access the nav items.

[isitreal]

I just took a look at the current Milonic menus, there's a lot of javascript, it looks like the default installation you get will not give you hardcoded menus, Milonic has always been very good at making drop menus in terms of cross browser support, but he's putting in noscript options for his menus on his site to get that search engine support, visit his site again and turn off your javascript and you'll see something you probably wouldn't want your users to see, this is not a good solution in my opinion, I'm a little surprised it's how he's doing it.

With drop menus there are quite different requirements for horizontal/vertical menus, vertical ones are much easier to do the CSS for, the first blobfisk test I did gave me stable 3 level drop menus in a few hours.

The main problem comes from using visibility: versus display: switching, if you can use display it's much easier to do the CSS, but several browsers out there won't do that without display failures.

The cleanest solution by far I've seen is the blobfisk menu, since it relies almost entirely on straight CSS to work, with just the barest javascript for visibility functions and timer functions, but that menu does need some more work before it can be put out for relative javascript newbies, especially on the horizontal CSS, I'm trying to come up with a more user friendly version, with substantially less code on the page and the script, but so far I've only been able to do a horizontal one with table and rows, which I don't like as a forward looking solution.

[stever]

Debatable whether you could call milonic the leading dhtml menu scripts - there are heaps out there as others have mentioned, including other free and commercial ones which are much lighter and very SE-friendly (and which I won't drop here!).

In general, there seems to be a bit of an unnecessary prejudice against using dhtml on the boards here. Judicious use of CSS and javascript can work very well from an SE point of view, as long as the dhtml is externalised and failsafe methods are used for non-js (and css) users (such as a text-link footer or text link to a sitemap).