Can search engines access content via drop-down menus?
July 23rd, 2008In the old days it was understood that search engines could not crawl web content (particulary dynamic content) that had to be accessed from drop down “select” menus. For example, if a site was about restaurant reviews in the US and users were asked to choose a state from a form menu (like the one below), the state listing pages would be all but invisible to search engines. But is this still the case?
In our test we “hid” pages with our keyword behind a select menu and found (to our surprise) that Google was able to quickly navigate the form with no problems. In fact the pages behind the select menu were picked up and indexed just as quickly (within a few days) as other, normal pages on our site. Yahoo!, on the other hand, still has not indexed the pages behind our select menu and it’s doubtful they ever will (we’ll keep you posted here).
This new finding begs the question: is it still necessary to have alternate entry points for search engine crawlers to access dynamic content? I say yes for two reasons: 1. because less sophisticated crawlers aren’t able to get past menus and 2. because it’s better to be safe than sorry for those that can access your content. It’s also important to consider the other ways folks may be accessing your content where drop-down menus aren’t ideal (mobile phones, text based browsers, screen readers, etc.). Sure it means more pages and more development but it also means even more pages indexed by those sophisticated search engines 
