Text in layers

[NigeW]

Everything I have read regarding content in layers indicates that robots / spiders can read this and therefore index the content.

I have a site that seems to not be working in this regard.

The site is

http://www.pacificcommunicationsco.com.

We have used some free code for scrolling layers and for it to be cross browser compatible the content is nested inside 2 layers.

When viewing Googles cached snapshot of the home page -

http://216.239.33.104/search?q=cache:B1oQbnNiqsQJ:www.pacificcommunicationsco.com/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

- no content appears.

Can anyone shed any light on if nested layers causes an issue or if you can identify any issues with the source code.

I am baffled

Thanks

Nige
kiwi-kid

http://www.potentialunlimited.co.nz

Nigel Wilson
"kiwi-kid"

http://www.potentialunlimited.co.nz

 

[ChrisHirst]

The layer visibility is changed by javascript. crawlers don't do javascript.

check what the spider sees with this

http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[ChrisHirst]

Nige,
Addition to the above post (it was late).

To get the crawler to read your text you will need put the same copy inside <noscript> tags. This won't help with the cache view of the page of course

Another useful tool for checking the spiders eye view is;

http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

this is a simulation of a text only browser and shows what crawlers see and what screenreaders can output.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[NigeW]

Hi Chris

Sory for the delay in responding - been away so couldn't get to PC - tourture !!!!

Thanks for your feedback - <noscript> tags are a good idea . . . This site is powered by ColdFusion / MySQL so would be a simple matter to insert another object in the template to pull in the page content.
However this approach would cause the site to break apart if someone didn't have scripting turned on - guess it is the minority who will be affected.
I'll have a think about this solution

Thanks again

Nigel Wilson
&quot;kiwi-kid&quot;

http://www.potentialunlimited.co.nz