Help needed please

deano6410 · 20-02-07

Afternoon all,

Sorry for the generic title of this post. Web design is not my strong point, so I didn't want to put something like "CSS problem" and later find out it was nothing to do with CSS etc

Anyway, here is my problem.....

I have one of those fancy Ajax sidebar menus that open when you click them. However, I don't think Google is reading the links within those menus correctly.

So therefore I am looking to have the menus constantly open/on display to both the robots and the readers.

Here is an example piece of code:


<h3 class="display" title="archives"><a href="#">archives</a></h3>
<div style="overflow: hidden; opacity: 0; visibility: hidden; height: 0px;" class="stretcher">
<ul>
<BloggerArchives>
<li><a href="<$BlogArchiveURL$>"><$BlogArchiveName$></a></li>
</BloggerArchives>
</ul>

What needs to be changed to sort this out?

Many thanks in advance.

Dean

deano6410 · 20-02-07

It would appear that my problem runs a lot deeper than this.

Apparently Google cannot read Ajax menus

http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry531.html

Does anyone know a way of sorting this? or am i best to just find a new theme?

IntervisionMedia · 20-02-07

I think that's just JS? Unless it makes an ajax request to the server to get sub menu items.

Anyway, the thing thats stopping you there is that the div containing the links is marked as hidden with the CSS. A solution could be to change it to visibility:block; then write some JS so on page load it loops the div's and check for a class of "stretcher", then set the visibility to hidden again.

So as far as google is concerned the menu is visible at all times. I'm not totally sure how that would stand with google on things like cloaking though, so a bit of research may be needed first.

Hope that helps.

deano6410 · 20-02-07

According to the link I posted Google sees this as cloaking :eek:

I think I will just find a new theme with a normal menu. The problem is that I struggle to find any good blogger themes. I am startign to realise just how good Wordpress really is.

IntervisionMedia · 20-02-07

You could always keep it, and manually link your main pages in the footer of your site or something, keeping the nice theme and maintaining proper links for SEO.

deano6410 · 20-02-07

Yes, I was thinking of just creating a manual mini sitemap in the footer. But this site has one of my main pet hates..... archiving by date as opposed to by category.

So that means I would have to be adding to the footer each month, and the site has been going since 04, so it would make the footer look a mess.

I could create a new html file and manually insert all the links into that, but it would be then 1 level down from the main page, and from an SEO perspective would not be too great.

I think I will change the theme. It is nothing special anyway, best of a bad bunch to be honest.

Thanks for the advice.

zinc · 20-02-07

AJAX = repackaged word for Remote Scripting

AKA javascript

Google could never follow javascript links...

IntervisionMedia · 20-02-07

Ajax = Asynchronous Javascript & XML which is making http requests through JS to retrieve XML data and dynamically update the client UI, which gets around the entire page request/response sequence of the web.

tbp · 20-02-07

I`d just add a sitemap, with a link to it on the index page.

Google loves sitemap pages, and makes a bee line for them, and then all your pages will get indexed. Its no problem that its one page down in terms of SEO, just call it sitemap.htm and google will actively search for it.

Its also a great way of getting keyword hits in google, as theres so many keywords on one page.