Smooth Navigational Menu - crawler accessible?

[Bluesplayer]

1) Script Title: Smooth Navigational Menu

2) Script URL (on DD): http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamici...smoothmenu.htm

3) Describe problem: Great menu system that works perfectly with my site. Can crawlers follow this menu though? I am including the menu using ajax include and I am wondering if the menu can be followed by crawlers. After a new section was added to my site a week or more ago I have yet to see the crawlers finding it and indexing it. I am wondering whether I should include say footer links incase?

[ddadmin]

In the Ajax mode, as long as you include a link to the external file itself within the menu's DIV, search engines will be able to use that to crawl its contents. For example:

<div id="smoothcontainer">
<noscript>
<a href="link to site map for search engines and user with JS disabled">Site map</a>
</noscript>
</div>

You might even want to change the NOSCRIPT tag to just DIV if you're concerned search engines do not crawl the NOSCRIPT tag, though as far as I understand it, all the major ones do.

[djr33]

For reasons like this, it is always a good idea to have very simple text only backup links somewhere for users who don't have certain features available:
-Images in text only browsers,
-Flash, Java applets and other plugins,
-Javascript (especially), and Ajax (less common than other forms of JS)
-even basic things like CSS, for really old browsers

So if you have a fancy menu, that's fine for most users.
But then also have a not fancy menu somewhere else, and it won't be pretty (in fact, hopefully not in the way of your design), but it will let any users who can't see the fancy menu (including search engines) still navigate your site just fine.
Search engines don't (I don't believe) care if an element is "important" in your design or not, and even if they did the links between pages on your site just help the crawler find its way around-- they're not really something that a search engine is worried about beyond that.

[Bluesplayer]

Thanks for that advice. I have now added a noscript menu on certain parts of the site that are being regularly crawled. Hopefully now all the sections will be indexed.

Cheers
Bluesplayer