Do search engines follow MenuMachine links?

Most crawler-based search engines such as Google will look through a site via its links to determine its content.

Most of the links in a site may be in the navigation bar created with MenuMachine.

Are the links in the MM navigation bar picked up by a web search engine?

Not at this stage, but you can place a simple link on your page for web crawlers to follow.

MenuMachine menus are created on-the-fly using JavaScript as the page is built. The links for each menu item are defined in JavaScript code. They are not <a> tags in the HTML. The JavaScript code creates the links when it builds the menu.

The links in the JavaScript code generated by MenuMachine are not readable by search engines as links. The search engines simply ignore anything between <script> tags.

While MenuMachine does not (at this stage) automatically create code that can be indexed, there are some methods you can use to work around this.

You can use <noscript> tags in the page to surround a manually created list of links. These links will be read by search engine bots and the pages will be indexed.

Another method would be to create a simple site map page which has links to all the pages in your site.

You can do this very easily in GoLive by creating a new blank page, then going to the site window, selecting the pages you want to link to and dragging them to the blank page.

GoLive will automatically create links to all the pages. You can then link to this site map page from your other pages with a standard <a> link, either with or without <noscript> tags around it.

If you put <noscript> tags around your link, it will be invisible in browsers with JavaScript enabled.

e.g. my map page is called "sitemap.html". I want an invisible link to the site map that web crawlers can follow. I would put a link to my "sitemap.html" page in my home page that looked like this:

<noscript><a href="sitemap.html">Site Map</a></noscript>

This method minimises the amount of effort you have to go to to update the site. Search engines will pick up the links to the site map page, follow them and then index all your pages.