Forum Moderators: phranque
I am about to re-design a site and I was thinking about including a jump menu (quick navigation) on the homepage. The main reason for this is to transfer some of the homepage PageRank to pages on the site which currently have no PageRank. However I do not know if the various search engines can crawl the relevant section of code.
I have done loads of searching and I can not find any threads anywhere that discuss this issue. Does anyone know anything about this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Regards Jenny.
NB I have provided an example of the code for one of these menus below
// -->
</script>
</head>
<body><div id="wrap">
<br>
<div>
<span style="float:left;"><a href="http://www.example.co.uk/agma">Home</a> ¦ <a href="contact.htm">Contact us</a> ¦ <a href="sitemap.htm">Site map</a></span>
<span style="float:right;"><font color="#286EA0">Go to:</font>
<select size="1" onchange="FP_jumpMenu(this,'window',false)" id="id1" name="Quick">
<option value>Aircraft Sanitation</option>
<option value>OSD569</option>
<option value>Synergen 501</option>
<option value>Synergen 718</option>
<option value>Styx 99</option>
</select></span>
<br clear:both />
</div>
<br>
<edit reason - use example.com>
[edited by: tedster at 5:04 pm (utc) on Aug. 12, 2006]
The main reason for this is to transfer some of the homepage PageRank to pages on the site which currently have no PageRank.
Stop right there. The reason for doing ANYTHING on your site is to BENEFIT YOUR USERS. Does this change help your readers? If so, then pursue it. If not, then don't. The sooner you focus your energies on building the best site possible, for your users, the sooner you'll actually have a quality site that gets enjoyed, recommended, bookmarked, and ranked well.
I hesitate to answer your question because it's absolutely the wrong question. But to answer it anyway, no, the search engines can't follow those links, because they're not links. A link is in the form of <a href="...">link text or <img src></a>. You can certainly add a jump menu to your page, but if you want the engines to follow links to other pages, you also need to include standard links on the page somewhere as well.
I have a similar Javascript jump menu on one of my sites. I put it there because I thought it was a good way to serve my readers, providing them an easy way to jump from one page to the next. The engines don't follow the links in the menu, because they're not really links. But my pages get read, bookmarked, recommended, and ranked well -- all for reasons unrelated to the jump menu.
In terms of the technical element of the response I realise that traditionally the bots have only read the simple html links but in 2004 Google did say something about changing this so thier bots could read some other ways of linking too - one being jump links. I have not revisitied this issue since then and I was wondering if anyone had evidence from their sites that google could read anthing other than these simple links.
Yes, today's bots will look at character strings in a script (or other places) that might be urls and try to spider them. However, there's a BIG difference between that action and actually passing anchor text influence, or Google PageRank and so on.
Also, if you look at your code, there are no urls to be seen in the jump menu section. There might be readable urls within the script -- wherever the function FP_jumpMenu() is defined (external .js file or the <head> section.) So a bot MIGHT read and try to spider those urls, if they are straightforward. But even this is not likely unless the urls are explicitly written out and not pieced together from variables or arrays within the script.
<form method="post" action="return false;">
<select onchange="location.href=this.value;">
<option value="http://www.example.com/</option>
</select>
</form>
<form method="post" action="return false;">
<select onchange="location.href=this.value;">
<option value="http://www.example.com/></option>
</select>
</form>
<option value="http://www.example.com/>http://www.example.com/</option>
M.B.J., a jump menu is **intended** to enhance user experience - but I agree it probably has the opposite effect as below. I don't see any negative SEO implications as long as all the jump menu links are replicated in plain text links elsewhere on the page.
I'm not so sure it really enhances anything though, for two reasons. One, "Jump to" or "Jump" in my opinion is a visual and mechanical cliche, we're not doing any jumping sitting at our computers. The real reason, however, is that the links are not immediately visible to the user and require action on the user's part to make them visible. Anything that requires the user's action to activate will very likely get completely ignored. So while the search engines may follow them if modified as pageone says, you may lose actual visits - is what you intended?
Oh and WELCOME to WebmasterWorld!
KingyJ said her purpose in installing the jump menu was to mess around with PageRank. I believe that kind of focus is a big, big mistake. I'm a big believer in focusing on the user, and seeing that rankings (and success) will flow from that.
As for the links in a menu not being immediately visible to the user, everything is a tradeoff. The alternative to ten jump menus with 20 items each, is 200 links cluttering up my page! And even if you're talking just one menu with eight items, by displaying all the links instead, you might still be pushing clutter in order to offer convenience. Everything's a tradeoff with web design.
Thanks again for all the responses. I will mull over the comments and decide what to do. Since I posted my original request for help I have found some other relevant threads so if anyone else is interested have a look here
[webmasterworld.com...]
and
[forums.searchenginewatch.com...]
