Manufacturer Drop down Menu and SEO

[Itchy Feet]

Hi there,

I have been using a search engine spider simulator to see what is seen from the website I am working on. It would appear that the 'manufacturers' drop down menu comes out as one long list - no spaces/breaks between the manufacturer names. Consequently this will be having a negative impact on any OSCommerce site's rating. I have looked at the manufacturers.php file and tried to include a break where I think it might be effective, but to no avail. I know that not all drop down menus generate the same list as a I put in a competitor's site that also has a drop down menu, and theirs comes up as a proper, readable list of names. So can anyone offer me advice as to how I can ensure that the drop down menu generates such a readable list and not just one long string?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Chris

[Jack_mcs]

Search engines can't read javascript so the menu is of no use to you for SEO purposes. You either need to replace it with a css one, set the option in admin to not use a dropdown or add direct links in the footer.

 

Jack

[Itchy Feet]

Search engines can't read javascript so the menu is of no use to you for SEO purposes. You either need to replace it with a css one, set the option in admin to not use a dropdown or add direct links in the footer.

 

Jack

 

Hi there,

Cheers for the response. When I mentioned the affect on SEO I just meant that since the crawler will read a big long string in stead of all the names of the manufacturers individually, then that would have an impact on the ranking - lots of keywords not read and the crawler thinking negatively of the string.

 

Does the manufacturers box in the left-hand column use javascript?? I just know that using the spider simulator it was a complete mess instead of a list of names - how exactly do I replace it with a CSS drop down?

Cheers for your help,

Chris

[Jack_mcs]

I'm sorry for the confusion (working on too many things at once - anything above one and I fall apart. :) ) - the manufacturers box doesn't use javascript. But it does use a form, which the search engines can't execute. So the result is the same. Having a bunch of keyword-relevant text on a page is a good thing but having a list of keywords doesn't usually help and can, in fact, hurt the page. If those keywrods are links though, that is, usually, a different matter. I don't think there is a css option for the manufacturer box, though I haven't looked in a while. I converted the code for the javascript categories box to one for manufacturers with the intention of doing the same for the css categories box but I haven't been able to get back to it. So continuing with that would be the way to go. Otherwise, removing the dropdown option in the manufacturer box is a good option, if it fits in with the site design.

 

Jack