Drop-down menus that are SE friendly?

[Tabasco]

Any tips about - or tools for - creating drop-down menus that still "read well" by the search engines (especially google)?

I used AllWebMenus to create a very useful menu but it doesn't look good in the spider sims. Also, the new Google listings since adding the menus don't look good either - the first part of the page text doesn't show up in the listings. I also don't think the site ranked as well because of the new menu but not quite sure how to tell. Was going to add no-script tags but the drop-down menu is very detailed so no-script doesn't work (we'd end up listing almost every site page since we don't have category pages).

So how are people creating 3-level, cross-platform compatible, search-engine-friendly drop-down menus?

Is AllWebMenus just not a good tool for menus that still allow good SE results? Or do all drop-down menus create probs with search engine results? Or am I missing some other issue here?

Thanks for any suggestions, examples, or links.

Tabasco

[Mark_A]

Tabasco afaikt you can do this with dynamic menus as long as you also make the initial menu link .. [ the one which on mouseover causes the drop down to drop down ] also into a simple html link to a lower page - that lower level page containing simple html links to the actual content pages.

Users e.g. ie users with security set medium will see the drop downs and use them, but with security set high .. they will only be able to use the initial menu links to the lower level options page and from there to the contents pages.

Again afaikt the SEs will behave like the ie user with sercurity set to high and follow the html link route not the dropdown menu route. .. a comprehensive sitemap with again simple links should also help them to find the contents.

I have seen this on a high volume site which does very well in the search engines inc google though they may have some other tricks in their bag also.

Hope you can decipher the meaning from this ..
Anyone know better feel free to step in :-)

[Tabasco]

Thanks for the reply, Mark A. I think I follow what you're saying.

> "also make the initial menu link .. [ the one which on mouseover causes the drop down to drop down ] also into a simple html link to a lower page - that lower level page containing simple html links to the actual content pages"

We do not have lower level pages with links to the actual content pages (that's what I meant by category pages). We do not want to add category pages, either. The menu fix would be a simple matter if we did. We created the menus so users could skip directly to products instead of going through the extra step of a category page. We are tying to minimize the clicks to get to products.

> "afaikt the SEs will behave like the ie user with sercurity set to high"

It's easy to see how the SEs behave - they will see the page as it's shown in the SE simulators (no js, etc). Try [searchengineworld.com...] if you haven't already.

Found an article on this topic at [milonic.com...] but other than redesigning the entire site structure to add category pages, still have no solutions. Anyone have ideas?

[Viscount9]

You could place links in the <NOSCRIPT> tag.

Search engines would pick that up. It has, so far for me.

[Tabas]

AKA Tabasco^(tm) here. I was asked to change my name since that's a brand name (oops). So I reclaimed my expired name. Maybe I should have chosen habanero or rocoto instead.

Yes, Viscount9, as I mentioned in my original post, I had already considered the no script tag.

Apparently there aren't any other options (or none that I've found after lots of searching) so I figured out a way to reduce and add the still-long list of menus in a no-script tag. Not pretty, but it worked for this purpose. Or I hope it does.

[stevenjm]

probably not the look you are after but search engines just love drop down jump to menus created using html <input> tag.

The page benefits by having all that menu title text listed as its not located within the <script>

Combined with links in the <noscript>

have seen pages at number one for very competitve search terms based entirely on jumpto menu text.(can also be abused)

[Bibendum]

You could always, create a static site map.
This way you also would be sect508 friendly (in a small way).

[killroy]

Also try using CSS. You can create a multi level dynamic drop down menu with pure CSS. And for spiders and text only browsers it will look like a nexted list.

SN

[Tabas]

stevenjm - thanks for the suggestion, but no, we don't want jump-to lists. You are right that they index well, tho.

bibendum - I do have a link to my static sitemap on every page. Gotta have a sitemap! :)

killroy - Sorry to say that I'm not up to speed with anything but veeery basic CSS. That's why I used AllWebMenus - because I wasn't able to do it the hard way. Or what looks like the hard way to someone with minimal CSS understanding. So much to learn...

Thanks for the additional input everyone.