Is using a select list for navigation SEO Friendly?

Question

I really don't like the use of select/option elements for links, but they've found their way into the designers portfolio as an option and try as I might to dissuade them from using them, I know I'm going to lose the battle without the power Google and "it's bad for SEO".

I searched all over the net, and can find nothing specific to support or debunk my thoughts.

The select list that I write will end up having full accessibility with a back end script to follow the link, but does anyone know for sure if search engines will follow or ignore the URLs?

<form action="/redirect-script" method="post">
  <label for="url-selection">Redirect to: </label>
  <select id="url-selection" name="url_redirect">
    <option value="http://example.com/" >Example.COM</option>
    <option value="http://example.net/" >Example.NET</option>
    <option value="http://example.org/" >Example.ORG</option>
  </select>
  <input type="submit" value="Go to URL" />
</form>

Cheers, Steve

Answer 1

Its probably not SEO Friendly

If this is a list of Sponsored links:

Since these are not actual links and redirection is handled either server side scripting or client side scripting then Google will not give credit to the site you are redirecting to.

Can I point out this: Why have a dropdown list of links? Sure it may save some space but it will require the user to click twice once to select and then again to click the Go To Link Page. Seems to me that from a usability standpoint you may want to consider a simple set of <a> tags.

Answer 2

A select element is part of a form and therefore no search engine will look at it (because it thinks it's a form and has no reason to). You're sending it to a redirection script as well, so it has absolutely no way of telling what the URL is directly from your page.

Answer 3

Well, the super search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and such might be able to figure it out eventually. However...

Search engines don't like to follow POST requests as they often do very special things like redirects, handle authentication (which search engines can't do), etc... So either they ignore them completely or maybe after quite a while, they'll grab a couple (remember, it would also have to try each combination of all possible fields in the FORM itself.

Most certainly anchor tags are the way to go. Also, for your designers, which should be worrying about user usability. SELECTs are terrible as the user can not see all the places he/she can go on your site, which means they will miss several possibly important links to your site. Also, users are looking for the famous, well known blue underline text when they want to navigate somewhere. Using selects makes the user look at other, unknown things.

Answer 4

Answering my own question (not the actual question, but what I consider the answer).

The designers wanted a drop-down select element, but semantically it's a list of links, so I utilized JavaScript to make a list of links behave like the dreaded select element does with onClick.

  $('#block-menu-menu-sites ul').append('<li id="other-sites"><span>select a site</span></li>');
  $('#other-sites span').click(function() {
    $(this).parent().parent().toggleClass('open');
  });

Then with a little css make it all pretty to look like a select. The only problem here is that the select class is not going to look like a browser's default.