How do Search Engines crawl Navigation Tabs?

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1

How do Search Engines crawl a website with Navigation Tabs?

In the header of each page on my website, I have code like this…


	<!-- TOP MENU -->
	<ul id="topMenu">
		<li <?php if($scriptName=="/index.php") echo 'class="current"'; ?>>
			<a href="/">Home</a>
		</li>

		<li <?php echo ((isset($_GET['section']) && $_GET['section']=="finance") ? 'class="current"' : '') ?>>
			<a href="/finance/">Finance</a>
		</li>

		<li <?php echo ((isset($_GET['section']) && $_GET['section']=="legal") ? 'class="current"' : '') ?>>
			<a href="/legal/">Legal</a>
		</li>

		<li <?php echo ((isset($_GET['section']) && $_GET['section']=="management") ? 'class="current"' : '') ?>>
			<a href="/management/">Management</a>
		</li>
	</ul><!-- End of #TOPMENU -->

How would a Search Engine crawl this and know which content is associated with a given tab, say the “Finance” tab??

Hope that makes sense?! :-/

Sincerely,

Debbie

2

[font=verdana]The best way to see how a search engine will crawl your site is to turn off CSS – and there you have it, the bare bones structure with headings clearly visible, links and text. If you don’t have a heading of ‘Finance’ at the top of your Finance section (regardless of how it appears on the formatted page) then you probably should do. If it looks massively wrong have it on the formatted page and redundant because of the tab itself then you can always use CSS to position it off-screen – that way, the heading is there for search engines and accessibility requirements, but doesn’t clutter up the visuals.

In terms of the PHP bits, search engines won’t be aware of that – all they see is the output source code, they neither know nor care how it is generated.[/font]

3

How do I do that in FireFox?

I don’t see any options to do that, and I was sure in the old days that was easy to do, just like turning off JavaScript?! :-/

If you don’t have a heading of ‘Finance’ at the top of your Finance section (regardless of how it appears on the formatted page) then you probably should do. If it looks massively wrong have it on the formatted page and redundant because of the tab itself then you can always use CSS to position it off-screen – that way, the heading is there for search engines and accessibility requirements, but doesn’t clutter up the visuals.

How would I do that?

Sincerely,

Debbie

4

Hi Debbie,

There are tools for this. I don’t have one I use regularly but I read about one the other day in a SEO guide and just searched and found this one from SEO-browser.com that works pretty well if you click the Simple button. It looks like they have a paid version

5

The web developer extension for FF provides an easy way to turn off styles: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/

Of course, you could easily disable your style sheet temporarily by breaking the link to it, but that’s a bit extreme, really.

6

I have FF Web Developer installed, but never use it.

Just looked at it, and don’t see where I’d select an option to “Turn Off CSS Styles”… :-/

Debbie

7

In the page I linked to above, you see in their screenshot an option to “Disable Styles”. I don’t have the Developer Tools showing at the top of my browser, so I go to:

Tools > Web Developer Extension > CSS > Disable Styles

8

You can also use Google’s webmaster tools to do “view as google”. This will use Google crawler browser and output how your pages is viewed by google eyes.