Can search engines find the text in a drop down menu? Is it better to have more links or a drop down menu?
-
Can search engines find the text in a drop down menu?
-
Both Ryans are spot on. If you are not sure if it is a CSS coded menu or not, I would suggest posting the URL to your site so one of us can tell you.
-
if you don't want search engines to see the links, for example if you are concerned about too many links on the page, then put the links in a JavaScript file and block it with robots.txt
Search engines can crawl regular javascript, whether they do or not, and how this will impact your site is not known.
-
It truly depends on how it is coded.
This isn't perfect but a pretty good idea is, go to your page, right-click and choose View Source. Can you see your menu list in the code? If you can, then Google can too. If you can't, then Google may or may not be able to see it, depending on how it is coded.
If you can share a URL of your site or another site with the exact same menu system, I can offer more information.
-
If your dropdown is powered by...
-
CSS: Yes, they can see it.
-
Javascrip:. Most likely yes.
-
Flash: Almost definitely not.
-
-
If it is coded correctly then search engines can and will read the links in the dropdown menu.
-
I'm not sure what a form select is. I'm referring to the type of drop down menu that appears when you hover over the word/category title you're interested in.
-
Yes, thanks!
-
Are you referring to a mouseover menu, or a form select?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How can i improve our TTFB?
Does anyone know about TTFB? Amazon.com TTFB is 50ms. 3dsystems.com TTFB is 109ms. My website TTFB is around 900ms. I have tried to use Amazon CloudFont and change our VPS to a dedicated server. But it still not under 700ms. My website is based on wordpress. How can i improve my TTFB? Could anyone help?
On-Page Optimization | | gordonstyles0 -
How many Anchor text i can make on One page.
I would like to have clear answer in numbers i.e. 1, 2, 3, or 4 etc. of how many Anchor text i can make on One page.????
On-Page Optimization | | 1akal0 -
Internal link text
Hi With internal links, should I make sure to always use the same anchor text im trying to rank the page for? For example im having a tidy up and have realised im linking to the same page in multiple blog posts using different anchor text. Whats the rule of thumb here? Thanks Chris
On-Page Optimization | | mrcsleonard1 -
Incoming Search Terms
Hi guys, I saw a blog post recently where the author added a list of "incoming search queries" to the bottom of his post, obviously to improve the post's ranking for those terms. On one hand, I suppose it it does help users find that post. On the other, it seems lazy and somewhat dodgy, but I haven't found any opinions on it elsewhere and have not seen this practice in my experience. What're your thoughts? Outright search engine manipulation? Cheers, Carlo SCWYt
On-Page Optimization | | mtgconsulting0 -
Header Links vs. In Page Links
We have lost considerable rank for some of our top search terms (department names) and the rank loss correlates to a change we made on our homepage. That change was to remove a secondary navigation to the major departments in the content of our homepage. Now all we have is the global header navigation on the homepage (and all other pages on the site). I have read that in-page links pass more value than sitewide header links and I'm wondering if this is really true. These were text links (not linked images) and our header also contains text links (and some javascript). We did not make any other changes on our site at this time and this was not around the time of any major algorithm updates. The site is www.ebags.com.
On-Page Optimization | | SharieBags1 -
Main page link reduction
I am in the process of reducing the number of internal links from the homepage with the assumption that the more links I have the more "juice" goes to internal pages I have two options since many of the links are costumer service related 1. create one link that leads to a costumer service page and place all the links their. 2. get all those links on the main page as nofollow links. what are your opinions
On-Page Optimization | | ciznerguy0 -
Do I really have too many links on my startpage?
My site www.poker-coaching.net is built with Joomla, and I have one main menu that links all articles (app. 120) in one language from the start page. The site has a language selection menu with translations available in 4 other languages, and for each language, there are another 80 articles linked from the main page. The SEOMOZ crawling report now say that I have too many links from the main page. I always thought it was a good thing for SEO to have articles linked from the main page - do I need to restructure my site and start building multi-level menu structures, where I would have a main menu on the start page and the next level menu would only be shown after a user clicks on a main menu item?
On-Page Optimization | | CatfishTPA0