SEO Tycoon

**ihsaan** · 03-25-2009, 08:32 AM

I need to place links on the frontpage as step 1. A drop down menu will look better but would it be just as good as a link when it gets crawled? Here is a picture for a better idea.

**wayfarer07** · 03-25-2009, 09:18 AM

Conventional wisdom is that the Google spider doesn't submit forms. However, just the other day, I found a cached image of the spider doing just that, when I was curious to see which links the search engine had saved in relation to my site. The form it used was a simple navigational cue much like the one you picture.

If you're handy enough, you can always make a suckerfish style dropdown with CSS and JavaScript. Although they are traditionally built to open on a hover, it wouldn't be hard to make one open on a click.

**Jeremy80** · 03-25-2009, 07:45 PM

Google may now be able to submit the form and crawl those pages, but the other search engines likely won't have this capability for some time still. So it is best to also include alternate text link navigation if you are doing to use a drop down menu for navigation.

**wayfarer07** · 03-25-2009, 07:59 PM

There are other search engines?

**ShawnITSolution** · 03-25-2009, 11:28 PM

This really does not matter which one you use. I mean google only looks for text based links.

It all depends on how you create the menus, if you are using javascript or pure text base css codes. As long as you are using text based links it don't matter and you can use either one you want to use.

**wayfarer07** · 03-26-2009, 01:12 PM

If Google only follows text-based links, how do you explain this? Cached Page

This is a cached snapshot of a page with query variables being passed. Near the top of the page, you'll see that the select boxes ("Is One Of" and "-Integration") are not in their default positions. Clearly, the spider is both moving the select box, and submitting the form, thus following a navigational cue which is not a text-based link. Or by text based links do you mean anything with text in the HTML source?

**Dalton** · 06-03-2009, 05:56 PM

I think it is much better not to focus on what the menu is.. what is more important is that the content follows the format of your web design.. though wayfarer07 is right about the subjective points that can help you .. still i would prefer the content value of your page...
Then in regards about the crawlers or spiders is on selections that is based upon the navigational cue.. So clearly it is on your rank.

**edgray** · 06-04-2009, 07:04 AM

Drop down menus get crawled fine. They are normally constructed from <ul>'s and if you look at them in a text browser like Lynx, you see they appear as a list. I've used them before and they worked beautifully for both the user and SEO purposes.

Go for the suckerfish menu described above, it's all you need.

**ericajoieake** · 06-04-2009, 10:05 AM

for me drop down menu is better than jump menu because it is created as static and static websites are seo friendly.