Search engine friendly drop down menus

[Taffd]

Good day all,
My site, is going through a redesign, an example of which can be found here. The redesign splits up the site into about 250 seperate sites, although they are in fact all one. Anybody viewing the redesign example, will note that the bottom of the page shows about 250 links. These links will be repeated on all the homepages of the 'seperate' sites, giving the whole site over 62,000 links, which should have some beneficial effect with search engines.
Questions.
Does the redesign example have too much of an adverse effect on usability. Is it too off-putting.

Is there a way to produce a drop-down menu that would make these links viewable to a search engine.

Regards
Taffd

[MidiMagic]

No. The links must be static for the search engine to find them. In other words, they must be in html.

62000 links might make the search engine think someone is trying to pull a fast one.

[Njegos]

You can have dropdown menu perfectly indexed by search engines using simple css structure. I run vast number of website that use dropdown menus and I never had problems with search engines indexing my sites. This has been myth same as people pointing that Google likes html pages more than php. :'(

On other hand having so many same pages with just few words different is horrible way to do search engine optimization. You can hurt your business! I suggest immediate removal of all additional pages until you create different text for each page. Search engines see your site as duplicate content monster and will ban your site from their index.

[autocrat]

I'm confused...
When you say "dropdown list" ... do you mean a Form Select that acts as a jump menu... or a "list" of links with CSS/JS to make them appear/disappear?

I'm not sure how SE's react to the Form Select (I would guess they cannot seem then as "real links" (I may be wrong though).
As for JS/CSS based menus - so long as the Links are there, and the CSS/JS adds the behaviour, you are fine.
It is when you have a JS menu that Includes the links or creates the lins that you get stuffed.

I would also strongly recommend following the advice of ...Njegos... - if you have pages and pages of almost identical content - you will not do you or your site any good.
SE's such as google want unique, distinct content, not minor variants, and may not index all your site, or even ban it.

[MidiMagic]

The search engine can find and index content that is in the HTML/XHTML file, but is made to appear and disappear with JavaScript-controlled style changes.

It cannot find or index content that is inserted by JavaScript into an already-rendered HTML/XHTML page.

[Taffd]

Thanks for all the replies so far folks, I learn more every time I visit daniweb.
Re all the comments about having multiple similar pages, I intend to make each country homepage more specific, thus hopefully avoiding the problem.
The multiple links, while being a trifle unweildy, will stay as they are, I think. The navigation will eventually give users access to over 25,000 news sources, 25,000 forums, 25,000 articles sections, 25,000 democracy sections, as well as some extra goodies. I think if I can make the site 1% successful, I will have achieved something.

[sagedavis]

I, for the most part, use the trifecta effect using css and html lists for my navigation bar.
http://www.search-this.com/website-design/css-rollover-buttons/
has some information about it, but, I am not sure if there is a better tutorial on the subject.

You can get it to work in all browsers with a couple of javascript hacks.

And, whoever says that it must be static, clearly does not understand that search engines do not read your PHP or asp. They only read the html or Xhtml that any browser would see.

If a search engine could see your scripting, what would stop someone from building one to extract your db connection information?

Back to this question. Search for CSS trifecta, CSS list menu

[efmesch]

As a non-professional, I would like to say that I found your site interesting and simple to use. However, the repetitiveness of the pages after selecting a link, makes it a bit boring. I realize that it means an awful lot more work, but putting more variety on the different links would add a lot. Maybe you could insertt pictures from the different country links to go with the diffrent texts.

[FC Jamison]

I use JavaScript and CSS for my drop down menus.

To get the search engines to follow the menu links hidden by the JavaScript, I add the section to my code:

<!-- Menu Links for Search Engines -->
  <link href="index.htm" rel="home" />
  <link href="resume/index.htm" rel="section" />
  <link href="portfolio/index.htm" rel="section" />
  <link href="gallery/index.htm" rel="section" />
  <link href="contact/index.htm" rel="section" />

[MidiMagic]

When browsing, I prefer tables of links over dropdown menus.