Javascript Jubilation?

aaronmp2003 · #1 (**permalink**) 12-01-2003, 08:33 PM

Okay, now that I am convinced that Content is King for SEO, I've come up with about a million different pages to add to my website.

The problem is that creating search engine "findable" text links to all of those pages would make for an EXTREMELY cluttered design. As it is, my back-up text navigation at the bottom of the page is becoming extremely bloated: http://www.aaronspersonaltraining.com

My (I hope) salvation is to switch to a mouseover Javascript menu containing categories that the rest of the site pages will fall into. However, my concern is that in doing so, I will lose the ability for the search engines to properly spider my site and/or recognize the hyperlinks as keywords that are part of my SEO scheme.

Am I just being paranoid, or is this a valid concern?

-- Aaron

cyanide · #2 (**permalink**) 12-02-2003, 01:51 AM

Hi Aaron,

Are you referring to when a button is hovered, then a pop up appears with sub-links ?

You do have right to feel concerned and kudos to you for asking. Yes, javascript in menus/links can hinder a Search engine's performance.

Personally, I'm not cool to the idea of having those pop-up style links. Yes they look neat, especially the dhtml ones, but in my opinion can slightly add to the 'extra work' it requires one to navigate a site.

I was actually just looking at your site right now and noticed you are using Javascript for the button hovers. I would suggest getting to know css for doing mouseovers. It's far more responsive.

What you could do, is keep that navbar right there, change those links to categories and for every category introduce some sub-links somewhere on the pages.

Suggestion:
In your <head>, most of the meta tags are not necessary and this one <meta name="revisit-after" content="15 days"> ...
It sounds like you're inviting the bots to come back after 15 days, true. Well, what if the bots wanted to come back 2 days later? Well, you've just told them to wait another 13 days. (hint, hint)

Also, don't lose sight of the fact that as your site grows, then usability, navigation and general organization becomes ever more important.
It's great that you drive traffic to your site, via search engines, but it's not going to help much if visitors leave after 2 clicks because they are confused or can't find the information they crave easy enough.

mikmik · #3 (**permalink**) 12-02-2003, 02:14 AM

Hi, aaronmp2003.

I also noticed that your graphics weight is a bit high, at least 100kb, then is weight of external scripts to consider.
I usually aim for about 60 kb as a total.
cyanide has some good idea's, I am fairly comfortable with CSS and have lots of menu's that are pure CSS and also DHtml, which is a combo of javascript and CSS style on html links. that means that you can put alt and title tags in the links that contain keywords that search engine 'spiders' read. And the links also show up for wimpy browsers LOL that don't use javascript - BUT MOST IMPORTANT, they are accessible, means text only browsers etc can 'see' the links.

I am a weight lifting guy!! I would love to help you and will show you some good sites with all kinds of menu's. Just post here and I will see it, or/and send me an e-mail!
Good to meet you!

mikmik · #4 (**permalink**) 12-02-2003, 02:17 AM

I should add that it is quite easy to make popup type menu expansions out of just html and css, in most cases - if they are at edge of page somewhere, then no sweat!!

aaronmp2003 · #5 (**permalink**) 12-02-2003, 08:17 PM

Mikmik and Cyanide -

Wow, what great information from both of you! You have both given me some valuable insight on where I'm at and where I need to go. I'm making an almost religious crusade out of getting this site found by the search engine's, so tips like you have provided are so very helpful.

Cyanide - good point on the robot text, I hadn't thought of that. I resubmit my site at least 2 twice a month manually, so it's just extra text having the "resubmit" stuff on the page. I've already taken it out.

Mikmik - I would definitely be interested in learning some more about the CCS scripts that you mentioned! I definitely see that as happening very soon, so please do share. Now, we need to get off the computer and get to the gym! LOL

Thank you both again for your help!!

-- Aaron

voodooboy · #6 (**permalink**) 12-03-2003, 12:29 PM

I am a strong believer in site map pages when dealing with very large sites. You can have JavaScript navigation on all your content pages, but keep one text based link on each that goes to the site map page. On that page you have all of your text links in an organized fashion for the human viewers, but the page is a perfect junction box for bots and spiders. I almost always submit the site map page when doing large sites. That way the bots and spiders hit that page first and then will logically record every page on the site.

And that’s my tip/suggestion for the day.

cyanide · #7 (**permalink**) 12-03-2003, 01:14 PM

Hi Aaron,

Quote:

I resubmit my site at least 2 twice a month manually, so it's just extra text having the "resubmit" stuff on the page. I've already taken it out.

I would advise to not constantly re-submitting your site to the engines. In fact google frowns upon it.

Once the bots start crawling your site, they will keep coming back automatically. Just concentrate on SEO and getting more sites to link to you.

matauri · #8 (**permalink**) 12-03-2003, 01:32 PM

Here is a good css menu, its a drop down menu, and would work well with numerous pages off your main site.

http://gazingus.org/html/menuDropdown.html

I was recommended this before & have been working with it on site upgrades. Previously I had heavy javascript ones & they were doing nothing for me in the search engine dept., so hence the upgrading of them.

Ditto to what Cyanide said about the resubmitting your site. Google usually spiders in less than 2 monthly increments, so you are probably doing more detriment to your site by resubmitting it.

Cindy

ChadHerring · #9 (**permalink**) 12-03-2003, 03:11 PM

Go for it! Do not hesitate to use those nifty javascript popup menu's!

But there is a trick that will help you with Bots traversing your website...

Place all of that bloated text links that you have at the bottom of your pages with a hidden <div> tag right at the top! Just put your text nav inside a hidden <div> right after your <body> tag.

Here is an example website to view the application of this little trick:
http://www.kroc.com/kroc_fm/

And here is an example of how to implement this little trick:

<div name="navigation" id="navigation" style="visibility:hidden; height:1; overflow:hidden; background-color:#000000" class="font_microscopic">

NORMAL TEXT LINKS HERE

</div>

That's all there is to it!

Also, check out this site for all kinds of great info on youyr robot instructions:

http://www.robotstxt.org

Hope this helps!!!

Elijah · #10 (**permalink**) 12-03-2003, 05:17 PM

Quote:

Place all of that bloated text links that you have at the bottom of your pages with a hidden <div> tag right at the top! Just put your text nav inside a hidden <div> right after your <body> tag.

NO! You don't want to do that!
The following is a quote from: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Quote:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

And from: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Quote:

Trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone. We think that's a bad thing.

And from your own WebProWorld: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=8166

Quote:

if it was a hidden link problem, rumours are that the Google algorithm automatically detects it (its not very good at it), bans the site, periodically rechecks the site to see if cleaned up, makes the site spend time in the penalty box (eg a month), then reindexes them if still clean - I am not totally sure that this is accurate, but is my best guess.

ChadHerring · #11 (**permalink**) 12-03-2003, 05:28 PM

What Elijah said is true, but only in the fact that Google says this on their site. My experience has been that this has not penalized sites, and I believe it has helped many achieve better rankings despite googles posted "warning"

For example. go to www.google.com and search for the terms (without quotes) "early morning show"

In this case, (and many others) this website has achieved a #6 rank...

In this case, the <div> tag is not technically hidden. There is just a style applied to the tag that results in it being hidden. *BIG* difference Elijah!!!

- if this is still a concern, try defining a class in your CSS that hides the <div> tag and call just that class, instead of including the style in-line.

aaronmp2003 · #12 (**permalink**) 12-04-2003, 09:46 PM

Once again - so much information! I'm beginning to think I could spend time doing NOTHING but working on this site, and still not do it all. Oh well, I do love my site, and everyone's suggestions are REALLY helping me to understand, and I will definitely be implementing some of the ideas.

I'm especially going to lean towards a lot more CSS. I've already got the styles on the site controlled by CSS, but if getting the navigation on track through that same route will help, I'm all for it.

-- Aaron

carbonize · #13 (**permalink**) 12-05-2003, 02:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aaronmp2003

Once again - so much information! I'm beginning to think I could spend time doing NOTHING but working on this site, and still not do it all.
-- Aaron

Yup, welcome to the wonderful world of running your own website. Wait till you have two or more sites to maintain :|

ChadHerring · #14 (**permalink**) 12-05-2003, 04:53 PM

Better yet... Dozens of sites with a development and programming staff to keep in line! HAHA!

MaineWeb · #15 (**permalink**) 05-26-2004, 03:16 PM

I have a huge javascript menu on my pages, www.MainResource.com . I think we have some good content and a really good product search, but I can see how the search engines could miss it because of the js. I liked the menu you mentioned, matauri, but I didn't like having to click on one of the top menus to have the submenus appear, I'm not sure most visitors to my site would try that. To load them all up, would I have to change the "window.onload = function() { initializeMenu"
to include all the line items?

Right now, my menu is in an external file. The menu loads a little slow the first page you visit on the site, but after that it is pretty quick. If I were to convert it to a menu like the one you mentioned, wouldn't that make all my pages huge?

Maybe there is some other option that I haven't thought of. I'll be grateful for any suggestions. Thanks!!

ChadHerring · #16 (**permalink**) 05-26-2004, 03:41 PM

MaineWeb,

Could I suggest the use of CSS to make your menus more functional and load much, much more quickly than the menu you currently use.

Also, one other note... Your SSL certificate seems to not be installed properly, as it gives me errors.

splinter · #17 (**permalink**) 05-26-2004, 05:52 PM

I would go the CSS way. It allows the menu to be seen if CSS is turned off.

@MaineWeb: This is what people with text browsers, speach readers and (apparently) most search engines see of your site:

http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview....esource.com%2F

Your javascript menu doesn't appear at all.

MaineWeb · #18 (**permalink**) 06-09-2004, 01:20 PM

Thanks for your comments. Viewing the text version of the page was interesting. I think I provided enough extra navigation so you could get everywhere you would need to even without the javascript menu.

I've done some css, but I have no idea how I would create a menu similar to my javascript menu with css. Suggestions on where to start? Examples of sites with a CSS menu? Thanks

greeneagle · #19 (**permalink**) 06-10-2004, 04:22 PM

ghstdrgns
Quote:
"I am a strong believer in site map pages when dealing with very large sites."
_____

I believe GOOGLE is very fond of Site Maps too. Make sure and HTML a little blurb about what is on every page using keywords! You just might find your SiteMap showing up in the SERPS in many places.

Ken