dTree and Search Engines

You are raising a very important question that MUST be considered. Unfortunately I am not surprised that no one has followed up on this post – we keep forgetting how important fallback is.

My guess is that NO items in the dTree will be indexed by regular searchengine spiders just like other no-javascript-capable devices will be able to see dTree items.

Eye-candy wise dTree is a pure pleasure and it gives the visitor a pleasant, time-saving navigation, but a fallback-method should be the first thing to consider in projects like this.

The easy way to overcome this is to make use of the noscript-tag and serve a full item static list-navigation for no-javascript-capable devices. This is the way that I will try to apporach this issue, as I am using dTree in a current project.

Anyone done this already?
Anyone having different views on this?

Regards
/Jesper Allermand

Let me know how this goes allermand!

Sorry, I haven’t found time to actually look at your code yet – too many project to finish before X-mas : /

But I found a simple solution that works – For each dTree main-function you enable, also make use of the corresponding WordPress default.

Say you enable the WP-dTree Pages functionallity from the Widgets page, you add the default WordPress Pages right below.

One lovely thing about WordPress (ok, theres a few) – you have classes everywhere. Every tiny little thing can be caught from anywhere, which luckily goes for the blocks in the sidebar as well – they all have their own id’s or classes, which you can make use of in the stylesheet (…or is that stylecheat =)

In your stylesheet add following to make the page SEO-friendly and obtain the great dTree-candy:

.widget_pages
{
display: none;
}

Voila! ces’t tout – and the same can be done with categories etc.

@ulfben
I still would very much like to dive into your dTree-code to see if I can find and suggest a more appropriate way for this that does not demand further action when enabling the dTree main functions. Unfortunately time is a bitch and I can’t say when this will be.

Happy coding all!

Speaking of SEO (and not gracefull degradation) – I’m no expert but I’ve always called the archives in the header, for spiders and bots to index but not for browsers to display. Am I doing it wrong??

Ok, I was not aware of the rel-links nor that they were added by wp-dtree. I guess that will help posts getting indexed, but what about pages?

I still think that the approach should be a non-javascript alternative within the php of wp-dtree – returning straight html if visitor has no javascript. I realise this is mainly for graceful degradation, but it seems to me that it would be more correct to add the fallback where its supposed to be – namely where the javascript demanding feature is.

I was thinking the best way would be to create the tree first as plain html, then javascript afterwards to collapse it all and make it pretty. That way if the script doesn’t load it will still display the whole trees and still validate. Also this way there won’t be duplicated content (the tree content in both script and noscript sections) which seems like better practice and might improve load time.

If/when I make any progress I’ll share.