Does content in drop down boxes get picked up?

Forum Moderators: open

Message Too Old, No Replies

Does content in drop down boxes get picked up?

Screamer

8:20 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Looking to improve optimisation for some pages sitting off from our home page. Targetting Google and Yahoo in particular.

Wanted to link to these pages from a drop down box off our home page, but was unsure how well a link from a drop down would optimise against a conventional hyperlink. Any ideas?

Cheers

Screamer

tigger

8:29 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

why not just place small text links on the bottom of the page, I've done that on a few sites and it works ok

jpjones

8:50 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I'd second Tiggers' suggestion.

Anything involving drop down boxes (are you talking about select lists, or DHTML driven menus by the way?) at the moment is not friendly for bots. You invariably end up having to use JavaScript to take a URL reference and refresh the browser location. 'Bots (at the moment) cannot parse JavaScript, and so the links you reference in the drop down box will be lost.

I would suggest the actual textual content of the drop down box might be indexed though.

Tony_Perry

9:02 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

text links at the bottom of every page is the only way to go. make sure the links are keyword rich!

teeceo

9:10 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

"text links at the bottom of every page is the only way to go."

Yea but, "how many" links on the bottom are to many? 50, 75, 100? thats the question?

teeceo.

tigger

9:14 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I wouldn't go past 100, but thats a lot of links

chris_f

9:38 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Screamer,

As suggested you have two main options.

1. A drop-down menu.
2. Plain text links in the page footer.

In regards to the drop-down menu. All major search engines will read the text between the option tags and this will help in site themeing. However, the don't use the drop-down menu so it can't be used as a sole means of navigation for the spider.

Links are definity the best way to go. However, I would never use more than 10 in the footer of a page. You page will already have navigation links at the top of the page and in the content, so you shouldn't clutter the footer with them.

The question you must ask is 'Are all these links relavant to this page?'. If taken on a page by page basis you can easily drop the number of necessary links.

Chris

anallawalla

1:13 pm on May 2, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have noticed that drop down country lists definitely help (or hinder) in the SERPs -- look for "SEO Afghanistan" and you will get examples of this.