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I own a very successful e-commerce site. We are a Yahoo store and currently have a left hand nav where all of the links are hard coded and look like this:
Cat 1
-sub cat 1
-sub cat 2
-sub cat 3
-sub cat 4
Cat 2
-sub cat 1
-sub cat 2
-sub cat 3
-sub cat 4
-sub cat 5
Cat 3
-sub cat 1
-sub cat 2
-sub cat 3
Etc. etc. etc...
Each page in our site is using the same exact navigation. This was fine when we were first starting out but now we have multiple cats/subcats and the menu is now getting rather l-o-n-g. What we need to do is shorten up the menu.
I have been thinking about options and it seems that a drop down menu would be the optimal solution in terms of customers having quick access to subcats and not needing to click around excessively to find what they are looking for.
We currently have *excellent* natural rankings on Google and we obviously don’t want to jeopardize that. I have looked at one system that claims to be search engine friendly because of the use of <ul> and <li> tags.
I realize that we are going to have to tweak the site no matter what if we change the nav structure. But my primary concern is with the menu that we end up using as a replacement for what we now have. Does anyone have any experience with dropdown menus or have any knowledge of whether or not it actually is able to be spidered. I am also open to any other suggestions. :)
Thanks in advance.
[edited by: caveman at 6:23 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] Removed specifics, per TOS [/edit] [/edit][/1]
I'm not a big fan of mouse over drop down menus, either for usability or for SEO.
They generally present too many choices to the user. I've found that clients who use them are more often than not trying to avoid the work and effort of coming up with a well thought out navigation hierarchy and content structure. In the case of Intel, that really is a big site, and the hierarchy is well thought out.
See this thread for a deeper discussion about usability issues...
Mouseover Menus - or DHTML indigestion
[webmasterworld.com...]
Drop downs also can present too many choices to the search engine. Having global drop downs might mean global links from your home page, which could easily cause you to have too many links on your home page. They're not a good way to distribute PageRank wisely. The Intel site is a PR9 site, so they can afford to be sloppy.
Re site structure for SEO with regard to PR distribution, you might want to take a look at this thread...
Search Engine Theme Pyramids and Google
Optimising the Pyramid for PageRank
[webmasterworld.com...]
If, in straight HTML, there is a clear and direct anchor tag with a url that resolves exactly as it is typed -- <a href="some-url"> -- then that link can be spidered and can pass on backlink influence. If the url is in a script, constructed from an array variable, etc, written out with a document.write() statement etc., then it is unlikely to be spidered. And even if it is spidered and indexed, the link is still very unlikely to pass on any backlink influence, Page Rank, or whatever schema the search engine is using.
That said, you'll see that Robert Charlton linked to one post of mine and another excellent resource as well. There is a lot to think about in building a menu and having that as part of the template for most of your pages.
[edited by: tedster at 2:27 am (utc) on Aug. 21, 2006]
We had a problem last year since our dropdown menu was at the top of the page and MSN, Yahoo and Google put all those blasted words as our description for many pages that didn't have a pre-defined description.
It looked terrible in the search engine results and probably made us look spammy since the words were repeated over and over throughout the pages. Needless to say those menus have been removed.
