Dropdown boxes and rankings

Will a drop down box affect KWD or placement?

[Phil_S]

I'm wondering if a drop down boxes will affect KWD or ranking on Google.

Will the same exact page stay the same in rank or go down.

We have so many band names and categories and I could put them all in drop downs for navigation but I'm wondering if its better to use link navigation instead.

thanks.

[qb4509]

Hi,

At this point of time nobody REALLLY knows how google works.

Just keep the site as user friendly as possible.

In theory a link structure is better but you must know about PR dilution / concentration through links etc. Once again nobody REALLY knows.

bye

qb4509

[DaveAtIFG]

Good answer qb4509! If you haven't already seen it, review Understanding Dominic [webmasterworld.com]. Google is in the middle of deploying a major upgrade and it could take a few months.

Over the past few years, it's been reported that links in drop downs have been ignored by Google if memory serves. I currently have limited, inconclusive, anecdotal evidence that this MAY be changing. To be safe, (I'm as certain as one can be under the circumstances! :) ) conventional link navigation still works.

[mfishy]

I had a site about a year ago that had only drop down navigation to some pages and those pgaes were never crawled. It is safest to put up a text link form the home page to a sitemap as a backup. It will not detract from your site and the Google will be fine with it.

[Phil_S]

Right now we have text links on the bottom of the pages to the main categories and drop down boxes for the sub-categories on the top of pages.

We have a lot of subcategories (about 200). The drop down boxes are long and push everything else down.

[WibbleWobble]

Doing the day-to-day browsing, the other day I came across a site that had three words for its snippet, on every indexed page. It was the first select option of a dropdown box.

Irritatingly, I lost the URL before I could arrange time to analsye the site further. Still, its food for thought, at least.

If you must have a dropdown box, I'd recommend either positioning it with CSS (so its at the bottom fo the document, but top of the rendered page) or having it at the bottom, instead of a "return to top" link. Either way, its the last thing thats read.

[TeofenGL]

I only really work with DB content, so this is a somewhat limited approach, but when i code a dropdown for navigation, (usually the select and go kind) i put a "GO!" button and -- this is where it's relevant -- a complete replica of the dropdown contents inside <noscript> tags...
this way, visitors without js won't be put off by the dropdown, AND google will be taken care of...

general experience indicates G doesn't crawl through forms...

[vincevincevince]

If you are using a dropdown box for navigation:

<SELECT NAME="">
<OPTION NAME=""><A HREF="http://where.it/wouldgo.htm">TEXT</A></OPTION>
<OPTION NAME=""><A HREF="http://where.it/wouldgo2.htm">TEXT2</A></OPTION>
<OPTION NAME=""><A HREF="http://where.it/wouldgo3.htm">TEXT3</A></OPTION>
</SELECT>

No flowers, please ;-)

[2_much]

We used drop downs on a few sites and found that those links never appeared in the linkto's.

However, when doing a KWD analysis through various tools, and when using a couple of spider sims, it appears that the words do count.

So perhaps the words are counted but not as links?