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

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!

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.