Can search engines find the text in a drop down menu? Is it better to have more links or a drop down menu?

[SewFabulous]

Can search engines find the text in a drop down menu?

[AdamThompson]

Are you referring to a mouseover menu, or a form select?

[94501]

Yes, thanks!

[SewFabulous]

I'm not sure what a form select is.  I'm referring to the type of drop down menu that appears when you hover over the word/category title you're interested in.

[AdamThompson]

If it is coded correctly then search engines can and will read the links in the dropdown menu.

[AdoptionHelp]

If your dropdown is powered by...

• CSS: Yes, they can see it.

• Javascrip:. Most likely yes.

• Flash: Almost definitely not.

[RyanKent]

It truly depends on how it is coded.

This isn't perfect but a pretty good idea is, go to your page, right-click and choose View Source. Can you see your menu list in the code? If you can, then Google can too. If you can't, then Google may or may not be able to see it, depending on how it is coded.

If you can share a URL of your site or another site with the exact same menu system, I can offer more information.

[donthe]

if you don't want search engines to see the links, for example if you are concerned about too many links on the page,  then put the links in a JavaScript file and block it with robots.txt

Search engines can crawl regular javascript, whether they do or not, and how this will impact your site is not known.

[WilliamBay]

Both Ryans are spot on. If you are not sure if it is a CSS coded menu or not, I would suggest posting the URL to your site so one of us can tell you.