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SportsGuy
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Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2007-Jun-21 13:51
OK, so I think the answer is yes based on another thread floating around here today, but I wanted to ask to be sure.
We have a site with a raft of static text links across it. It does very well with search traffic, and while we want to update the look & feel, we don't want to kill search traffic.
My advice was to leave the links alone (they are the nav links), but after thinking of this for a bit, and doing some research, I want to offer up this idea to the design team. I'd like to see the look & feel updated to improve things from a user's perspective.
So, this example from a site in the UK is what we're after.
Hover over the main nav items across the top and you'll see the drop down menu items.
This is done via CSS (My designers tell me), so I'm hoping the links will remain indexable. My biggest concern is killing the current internal link structure of the site if we move to a system that makes the links unseen by the spiders - hence my direction to avoid javascript drop downs.
Since I'm not a programmer or designer, I'm asking folks here to offer up opinions/advice.
Will that type of nav structure work? Will it allow the spiders to still crawl all the links inside properly?
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10438
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Posted: 2007-Jun-21 20:48
Look at the source code.
If the links are normal <a href="...."> style HTML then search engines can spider them.
CSS will style those links for browsers; search engines don't see that, they only see the HTML.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2007-Jun-21 20:54
That's what I was thinking based on your response in the other thread, but I wanted to be sure before I unleashed the hounds here. 
Thanks.
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mj1256
Joined: Jun 05, 2006
# Posts: 918
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Posted: 2007-Jun-21 23:43
although I'm not a css master, i have experimented with these CSS types of menus and discovered cross browser compatibility issues. It just doesn't work consistently in all of them. Inparticular, i tried the page in your link and it did not work in opera9
[ Message was edited by: mj1256 06/21/2007 03:53 pm ]
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mj1256
Joined: Jun 05, 2006
# Posts: 918
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Posted: 2007-Jun-23 05:12
Here is a CSS browser tester
[link]
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2007-Jun-23 13:54
Thanks mj.
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Hampstead
Joined: Feb 20, 2001
# Posts: 2015
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Posted: 2007-Jun-23 22:34
A good way to check spider friendliness is to use the web developer tool bar in FireFox.
It gives the ability to disable styles so that one can see the page as the SEs see it.
If the links are visible, they are spiderable.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2007-Jun-29 19:43
Anyone else have anything to offer on this topic?
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mj1256
Joined: Jun 05, 2006
# Posts: 918
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Posted: 2007-Jun-30 05:32
I believe the firefox tool is called rankquest, it has some nice features
I found that a simple table structure with a color background, a keyword link and a simple css style tag for the hover over placed in the head works great
stick this in your head section before the </head>
<STYLE>
A:link {text-decoration: none}
A:link {color: #FFBB00}
A:visited {text-decoration: none}
A:visited {color: #FF9F00}
A:hover {color: #99CCFF}
A:hover {text-decoration: underline}
</STYLE>
and make your menu with a nice simple table
<div align="center">
<table border="1" width="200" cellspacing="1" id="table1" bgcolor="#00FFFF">
<tr>
<td align="center"><a href="http://www.searchengineforums.com/">
link1</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><a href="http://www.searchengineforums.com/">
link2</a></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><a href="http://www.searchengineforums.com/">
link3</a></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
its not a drop down, but the spiders like it and it has some action happening witht he mouseovers, and yes, i made it as ugly as possible
This is too big to post here, but go to my demo site grownupsonline dot com and right click for the source, the dropdowns are javascript and the menu and links all appear as static links in the code, as far as i know, if i can see the links, the spiders can see the links
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g1smd
Staff
Joined: Jul 28, 2002
# Posts: 10438
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Posted: 2007-Jun-30 10:35
Making the navigation bar using a nested list (instead of a table) allows some easier "reveal" effects to be implemented using CSS and makes the HTML code slightly simpler.
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mj1256
Joined: Jun 05, 2006
# Posts: 918
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Posted: 2007-Jun-30 17:23
absolutely
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excell
Staff
Joined: Mar 19, 2001
# Posts: 14512
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Posted: 2007-Jun-30 21:30
"Look at the source code." Um yup - and check everything in a text browser. When using fancy navigation, as is often required by a large site..
then always use noembed or noscript or whatever it is that you need to do to make that site readable & easy to navigate by a blind person.
When designers want to design you have to give them wings and then have the energy and knowhow to back it up and support them - visa vera designers need to listen to the needs of the other partners on the team.
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SportsGuy
Staff
Joined: Aug 30, 2002
# Posts: 3600
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Posted: 2007-Jul-05 19:08
Thanks gang.
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excell
Staff
Joined: Mar 19, 2001
# Posts: 14512
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Posted: 2007-Jul-07 17:20
And so? are you going to show us your end result?
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