Yahoo and Javascript Drop Downs
Yahoo informed us a while back that they had problems with our navigation at http://www.framesdirect.com. Apparently, on the bottom of some of our catalog pages we had links to “More designer eyeglasses” where we would list other brands. Say for instance someone is looking at Ray Ban eyeglasses on our Ray Ban catalog page. At the bottom, we’d have a section for “Other designer eyeglasses” and list Rodenstock and others that came close alphabetically. We figured it was handy for the user and is pretty standard. Heck, even Amazon.com does it.
Yahoo, however, considered the practice to be spammy and redundant. Of course, when you try to ask what they mean, they basically just repeat themselves (look at our guidelines, etc.) and won’t give you any information.
We couldn’t figure out why they felt this way. Our competition is doing the same thing (and a lot worse) and Yahoo wasn’t giving them any grief.
The “redundant” part is what we couldn’t figure out. After all, our drop down navigation is in a javascript, which isn’t spiderable, so we weren’t repeating links on the page. It just didn’t make sense.
So, we’re in the process of reinventing our navigation system to make the Yahoo Gods happy and hope to roll it out shortly, but a funny thing is happening. I just noticed in our ranking reports that a lot of our brand phrase keywords are ranking well in Yahoo.
Interesting. What appears to be happening is that the main page to the Frames Direct site is ranking for search phrases rather than the actual product page. For instance, we show a #1 rank in Yahoo for “abba sagami eyeglasses” for the main FD page and it appears to be finding “abba sagami” in the drop down and is obviously pulling “eyeglasses” off of the page.
What is really interesting is that if you view the source for our main page in IE, the links in the drop downs don’t show, which would lead me to believe the drop downs aren’t spiderable. If I spider the page with my spidering software, the drop down links don’t show up, either
But, if you view the source in Firefox, the drop down links appear and you can find “abba sagami” in it. This would lead me to believe that Yahoo is suddenly using technology similar to Firefox and can find those javascript drop down links.
Fascinating. Apparently Yahoo was seeing something that we weren’t. As far as they were concerned, our javascript dropdowns ARE spiderable, meaning we were repeating links on the pages.
Wow. That put a whole new spin on things. If they had explained this, we would have seen the light earlier, but as usual, they gave an edict with no explanation and left it with that. Communication is not one of Yahoo’s strengths.
But, this makes me wonder if Google will be following suit? If so, a lot of sites using drop down javascript navigation could be in for an interesting time.
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