Are Java menus easily indexed by search engines? If not, is there a
way to make them friendly?

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Request for Question Clarification by joey-ga on 03 Aug 2004 14:39 PDT

Are you referring to menus created by an actual Sun Java applet (e.g.
the HTML code shows and "<embed>" or "<object>" tag?  Or, is it
JavaSCRIPT (where the menus are shown by a "<script>" tag?

There are two web programming technologies out there with very similar
names but which do very different things (java and javascript).

--Joey

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Clarification of Question by coglietti-ga on 03 Aug 2004 15:16 PDT

Yes, thank you, I mean Java not Javascript. Any article links that you
could send me would also be greatly appreciated.

As mentioned before, you may be confusing Java with JavaScript. 
JavaScript would definitely be the more common way to create menus on
webpages.  If this is indeed what you are referring to, then yes, in
many cases search engines will be able to grab keywords from your
menus.  Realize of course that results will probably vary with
different search engines.  It would also depend on how your menu
script is written since most scripts that I've seen are dynamically
created instead of incorporating simple HTML.  I don't know of any
search engines that search for keywords in javascript source code.  If
you post the menu script that you are using I can help you determine
how search engine friendly it is.

If you really did mean Java and not Javascript, then I'm afraid that
at least for right now, your menus will not be indexed by search
engines.

Hope that helps!  Please let me know if you need any clarification.

Josh Fraser

Hi, and thank you.

Yes, I did mean Java. I am aware that JavaScript is not indexed by all
engines. I believe that it may look at the keywords in the JavaScript
drop down menu though.

Do you have any documentation where I can read more about how Java is
not indexable by the engines? Or is that beyond the scope of this
forum?

I don't have a Java menu for you to look at right now. But, thank you
anyway. You have answered my question.

It's probably because spiders don't run Java. The best way to
determine if your site will be indexed (and what it will index) is to
look at it with a text browser such as lynx
http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/lynxport.htm

It takes a long time to open a java document relative to the pure text
of HTML. Considering the *B*illions of websites to parse, waiting more
than a few seconds to load a Java menu is time consuming. Besides,
Java is a programming language, so  a spider will be hard-pressed to
figure out if the Java Applet is a menu or a game or any other
Application. If you've searched Google long enough, you'll come across
messages like "You don't appear to be running Java on your browser."

For all intents and purposes, and if you browse Google Answers about
"Why is my site not indexed?", a major cause is sites run on Flash.
Why? Because the spiders can't see Flash. Java is the same thing.

Don't forget there is still a significant number of people in the
world who can't visit your Java Enabled site (WebTV among them :).

This is a little off-topic, but it does appear that Google is gaining
the ability to index Flash content. Just do a search for .swf
<://www.google.com/search?q=.swf> and you'll find that the spider
has been able to grab some content from Flash files. Maybe Java isn't
too far behind.

I would like to thank everyone who answered my questions. One thing
for sure, I think if Java menus are used, it would be a good idea to
supply a text link menu somewhere on the page also. That way the
spiders would have something to crawl.

Chris