I don't care for drop downs, frankly. I want to see the nav, too. The site they're building encompasses 3 aspects of the business and they want a visitor to see all 3 aspects when they get to the home page. They're using a 3 box layout with drop downs to go to the different sections (looks better than it sounds, trust me).
personally, I'm a TEXT nav type of gal myself ( you can do some cool stuff with CSS) however, I was reading an old post by JS and it said something about not sacrificing the look of the site for the SEO, which I tend to agree with. I'd still rather use text, though, but I don't see a good way to lay this out in the 3 sections and get the visitor to 'get' the site at first glance (usability is important, ya know )
On another note, I read somewhere in my travels that the spiders can read the client side includes, which is an external file, yes? So how does the js differ in that respect? It is also an external file or do the spiders read it differently since it wouldn't be, for example, a php include file?
Lastly, from an SEO standpoint, this site sucks because of the 3 sections, so my strategy is going to be to try to focus on the 3 landing pages as well as the home page. Any thoughts/ideas/rants?
On another note, I read somewhere in my travels that the spiders can read the client side includes, which is an external file, yes?
The only client side includes are frames. And no SE cant read frames without noframes tags.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cimmeron
So how does the js differ in that respect? It is also an external file or do the spiders read it differently since it wouldn't be, for example, a php include file?
SE dont even download external JavaScript file nor have the processing power to compute pure JavaScript.
This Drop down menu is "Accessible" for search engines:
All you need to do is style it with some DHTML (Thats CSS + some Java Script). Depending on the DHTML this makes it only WCAG 1.0 Single A and Section 508 compliant. You maybe able to make it double A but you need to then make it drop down without the use of a mouse and have re-sizable text.
If you have sitemap then search engines will look to sitemap and if there is a page at that adress it will try to index it. If there is a sitemap then search engines doesn't cares about there is a link to that page or not. It tries to index it.
My sitemap generator is for maximum 1000 pages only. If you have larger site then you can search for sitemap softwares but generally you have to pay for them.
Cimmeron, are you referring to a PHP include as a stand alone, or PHP include that is in a page? I have entire websites that are mostly PHP includes. The main v7n site is generated from 10 or so PHP includes.
The SE sees what is rendered, not the individual pieces of code.
Yeah PHP includes are server side includes not client side and yeah SE see them as one page unlike external JS files but this going off topic!
Quote:
Originally Posted by KRM
If you have sitemap then search engines will look to sitemap....will try to index it.
Yes it indexes the pages but its not the solution for SEO because you lose out on multiple internal link text use and so would lose out in the ranking of top level menu pages!
Also it still maybe illegal under Law becuase a screenreader would have to navigate a massive list of pages.
I have already listed the only sensible solution for a drop down in my post above.
Yes it indexes the pages but its not the solution for SEO because you lose out on multiple internal link text use and so would lose out in the ranking of top level menu pages!
Also it still maybe illegal under Law becuase a screenreader would have to navigate a massive list of pages.
Also, do ASP includes work the same way as PHP, in that the SEs read it on the page? data is actually being pulled from sql.
The only reason it wouldn't would be you have an excessive number of links ( last time I tested ~120, most people reccomend no more the 100 per page ) or an excessive file size, which from looking at the serps ( I did this sometime ago it may have changed in the last 8 or 9 months ) would be a filesize of about 1/2 a meg for google ( hint: look at the cache of really really large pages ).
I used one of those free meta tag analyzers and it said I had something like 376 links.
I always do <div> with hover properties to show menus, the divs inside the hidden layers are spidered by SE's and the text is still used by the SE's as the content is in plain HTML on the pages.
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The easiest way to check for this is simply click on View -> Page Source and look at the HTML Code to see if it links to the correct pages, otherwise, Spiders won't see it
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