The Trouble With Drop Down Boxes
April 16th, 2008
I’ve never claimed to be an SEO expert. But because I do so much work with websites in general, I am required to know some basics. Today I am reminded about something that is not such a good thing to have.
They are drop down boxes, or even radio buttons for navigation
Simple reason - drop downs and radio buttons that automatically direct people to a page after they are selected require Javascript. And Javascript - as commonly known - is ignored by robots. So if you have important links to your content and are using this method of linking, they won’t be crawled.
So if you have a landing page (like a homepage) with drop down or radio buttons - even flash navigation, get rid of them. Or at the very least put regular links to those pages in your footer or somewhere.
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April 16th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Hi Lynette,
Would it not be enough to have a sitemap that has all the pages. Google likes sitemaps.
Thanks
Jack
April 16th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
Nice catch Jack. Yes absolutely, sitemaps work as long as the sitemap is placed where the SE’s can get to them to crawl.
April 16th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Well, I wonder. I coincidentally came up with an odd problem.
I was searching for a site’s affiliate program and when I used the site search for “Affiliate Program” it gave me a bunch of results. I’d go to the page and use the “Find” feature in Firefox and NOTHING.
I went to Google and entered the domain name plus the words “affiliate program”. It also gave me a bunch of results. I clicked the “cache” version which should highlight the words. NOTHING was highlighted. I was perplexed.
Then I realized the menu at the top was a bunch of drop down buttons and sure enough, when I looked at the right one, there were the highlighted words “affiliate program”.
So, Google was reading those words in the dropdown box and perhaps it was also following through the links as well. That I’m not sure of.
Obviously, I think this could have been Flash dropdown boxes, but what the heck do I know. I’m certainly not technical. Just thought it was interesting that I read this blog entry early and then got all perplexed by a drop-down box later.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I think it depends on the type of drop downs. I’m talking about those boring form type drop downs. There are some methods that do use some Javascript and a lot of CSS to make drop down menus. But those type of drop down menus, the URL to the pages are coded into the HTML. So the robots can still see them. That’s why I personally prefer to use a lot of CSS even though it may frustrate some site owners. But with CSS you can be friendly to the robots, achieve the look you want with drop downs.
April 21st, 2008 at 5:04 am
Uggh! That is so scary; after all you spend so much time and energy loving your site into being. Thanks for drawing attention to this problem before I had chance to go down that route!
With upgrade after revamp after upgrade; so many of us will have fallen into the trap of the pretty drop down boxes. Drop down boxes and buttons look and feel professional and are clean-cut; they are very attractive, aren’t they?
Would having a couple of drop-down ads on my blog or site result in the same problem or is this problem purely in relation to site navigation?
Being a bit of a dweeb on things like this, if a site map can improve the crawling of the site/blog; can you recommend any really simple ones that I might be able to work with?
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 pm
What is a site map?