XML tree structure menu and crawlability

Will my menu content be crawled?

[Ghost]

I am hoping someone can shed some light on this.

I am thinking of building a directory like menu structure with three levels of data.

Do you know whether this will be indexed when the crawler comes to visit?

[davidpbrown]

If it's on the web then the crawler might be expected to go to those pages it knows are there.. those that are linked to or suggested to it.

Most crawlers are looking for HTML/XHTML and don't understand XML that isn't XHTML. XML files are just text files containing well-formed data structures.

For example, crawlers will not know your XML tag <a> is a link to another level of your menu, unless you define this explicitly by suggesting it is an XHTML document, where <a> is defined as an anchor. They won't crawl links from one non-XHTML/HTML=text document to the next, since only you understand that there are links to be found.

dpb