Moving Menu out of Search Engine Reach [Archive]

simon132

04-28-2006, 03:50 AM

I have been using modifed a modified version of awdor20x3 template, running on OR 2.2, for a while and have been battling to get enough changes to make a site that search engine crawlers will see, as they should, and I want them to.

At the moment the menu is crawled before the content and I end up with search engine listings that have the menu as the description.

Has anyone done a mod so that the content is the first thing crawled? Smarter folks than me may have used CSS to achieve this result. Unfortunately I have absolutely no coding skill, although I can debug someone elses code okay.

Maybe that same skilled soul may have moved the js tag out of the way as well, crawlers just hate js.

Any *polite* advice?

Cheers,

Simon
www.newenglandcedarhomes.com

Nathan

06-08-2006, 05:02 AM

For a start This:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/livehelp/livehelp_js.php?relative=Y&department=2&pingtimes= 15"></script>

Should be in the head where it belongs.

This:

<div class="header">
NEW ENGLAND CEDAR HOMES    

</div>

Should be:

<div class="header">
<h1>New England Cedar Homes</h1>
</div>

Or better just:

<h1>New England Cedar Homes</h1>

H# tags are important, why comment them out?

On that note you have a h2 before a h1 in the source, this makes no semantic sense. Look at it this way h# is a hirachy (or priority) so h1 is the most important heading tag on your page, thus it should be the first heading tag in your code (and there should only be one h1 in a page), followed by h2, h3 etc.. if you put h2 over h1, crawlers can't make sense of your document structure, having the nav above the content is not your problem.

Your code makes little to no semantic sense this is why you are having trouble with crawlers.

An example of what your code should look like is this:

<DOCTYPE>
<html>

<head>
...
Scripts, Stylesheets, and a good description of the site content and keywords that match the content.
</head>

<body>

...maybe a containing element if needed, i.e.

<div id="container">

...a header is a good idea, here you can put your h1 and h2 tags, the spiders will love you for this, i.e.
<div id="header">
<h1>Site title</h1>
<h2>buyline</h2>

</div>

...main navigation can be first this makes no difference so long as your document is well structured
<div id="nav">
...
</div>

...content, here you can use the lower levels of h# tags, i.e.
<div id="main-content">

<div clas="anything">
<h3>A nice house</h3>
<h4>in a nice suburb</h4>
<p>...</p>
</div>

<div class="anything">
<h3>another nice house</h3>
<h4>in another nice suburb</h4>
<p>...</p>
</div>
</div>

...footer or what ever takes your fancy down here

</div>

</body>
</html>

I know it may seem boring but go to http://www.w3.org/ and look at the spec, all of the answers to your issues are here, you just need to look.

This is not an issue of "CSS could fix it", CSS can't fix your issues, only good well structured semantic HTML will solve your problem.

BTW: You really should validate your code, You have 87 errors in it at the moment, 99.9% of these are easily fixed, although they may not hinder your search engine rank they highlight semantic problems that once fixed certainly won't hurt your rank...

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newenglandcedarhomes.com%2F

I hope this helps.

Cheers!