Can you explain how Search Engines crawl a pure CSS drop down menu.
Do they just crawl viewable content?
Do they crawl the complete navigation bar including drop downs, which are not immediately viewable?
If the main links just say: Home, Contact, Shop, New Products, Coming Soon
do search engines just rank this content or do they also crawl the drop downs too, which might be:
Home: Home
Contact: Contact London, Contact Cambridge, Contact New York, etc.
Shop: Shop for Iphones, Shop for Apple Macs, Shop for Ipad 2
New Products: Iphone 5, Iphone6, Iphone 7, etc.
Coming Soon: More products listed, etc…
:goof: And would you suggest Horizontal Drop Down Menus eliminate the need for a left side navigation, or would you include one too. i am undecided as of yet.
Basically, search engines crawl HTML. So if your dropdown is made up of nested lists, that’s just a bunch of nested lists containing links to Google. Simple. So yes, Google will be aware of all the links.
As a general rule, I’d say avoid drop downs if you can. Better to have a row of links to the main site areas, and further options when you get to that section, like links in a sidebar. Dropdowns are sexy and all, but not necessarily all that accessible or all that usable. It’s a bad idea only to provide page links via a drop list, as then anyone who can’t access the drop menu won’t be able to get to those pages. So often as a fallback there is a list of links in the footer too.
But the dropdown may not work on mobile devices, so it there a fallback? I’d say it’s better to concentrate on a logical site structure and just link to main sections in the primary site navigation bar.
Can you explain how Search Engines crawl a pure CSS drop down menu.
To compliment what Ralph said, look at the menu in question with CSS, Javascript and images turned off. That’s what teh googles see.
Though be aware, while Google doesn’t pay attention to display: none (or much CSS at all), screen readers do, so this is why I usually avoid display: none for hide-show techniques.