I was recently working with a client who has a very large website and would benefit from having a drop-down menu– you know, a menu that when you mouse over a link a second level of menu drops down underneath. Their concern was that the second level would be hidden from the Google search engine and they’d miss getting new customers.
Ah the all seeing-eye of Google! Never fear, when Google is searching the web it’s reading code in the back-end, not the design of the front of the website. You don’t have to sacrifice your website to a cluttered design.
Here’s a great example. The Business of Fashion website is clean and newsy. All the linking pages are nicely organized in a navigation bar at the top of the website.
When you mouseover Global Currents a drop down menu appears. One of the links in the menu is Market GPS. When you look at the underlying code of the website Market GPS is right there in the code. It appears as a link and text, both are things Google’s search likes.
So keep it clean, folks. A drop-down menu keeps a site organized and it won’t do you a disservice in the search engines.
