Form element / option box not indexing.

[dwrightcwf]

I noticed something a little strange today which I hope someone can help with this two part question.
We recently decided to purchase a new search tool for our site and upon running the spider to index all of our pages we noticed a problem. Anything that used a form option box was not getting indexed. This, of course, raised a red flag that the links in our drop down boxes might not be getting indexed in the engines. Could this be so?

So my question is can the spiders read the links in our drop down boxes and if not what would be a good work around for this issue. I did try searching for a previous topic on this and came up with nothing.

Here is a page which shows and example of the form elements.
http://www.continentalwindowfashions...-hardware.html

Thanks for any and all help with my questions.

Dave
www.continentalwindowfashions.com

[incrediblehelp]

Even if they did follow them (dont think they will in your case), it would not be ideal. Consider using a CSS drop down that can be spidered fully while applying the best possible anchor text to each link.

[dwrightcwf]

incrediblehelp, thanks for the reply. As you can see we use a css menu at the top of the page and wasn't sure if we could use two instances of it on the same page. I know that would be the smart way to go (css) but just couldn't understand why the form element was not getting spidered.

Dave

[adverlicious]

Try a search engine spider simulator to get a sense of what Google et al are encountering on your site -

e.g.

http://www.webconfs.com/search-engin...-simulator.php

Also, have you verified that the pages in question aren't being indexed at all? Or are they simply ranking very, very poorly? It's rare that public pages like this don't get found at all.

If they've indeed been missed, you'll want to consider Google's XML sitemap, hand submissions, webmaster dashboard, supplemental navigation links, inbound deep links, etc.

If they have been indexed but are ranking poorly, that's another problem altogether ...

[dwrightcwf]

Well we index very well so that is not the major concern. For example we sell "curtain rods" and currently hold a #2 position on google for that term and many others. I was just puzzled at why these were not getting picked up.

We have since changed those links to a css drop down menu similar to what we use for in our main navigation at the top of the page.

Thanks for your help.

Dave