I'm new to DNN, and I'm just starting to learn about skinning. One of the most important issues with my websites is that they must be highly optimized for search engines. Well, I was just mousing around on a experimental DNN site I'm working on, and I noticed that I don't see URLs in the status bar at the bottom of my web browser window when I mouse over links in the top navigation. So I dug a little deeper, and I couldn't even find anchor tags (links) in the source code of the home page for the navigation links. All I could find was some kind of funky span tag with an xml attribute that contained all the navigation data. How are search engines supposed to crawl a DNN site with a navigation like this? I need traditional anchor tags for navigation links. Are there any alternatives available so that my DNN navigation can have traditional link anchor tags? ...or a nice drop-down menu system like "Son of Suckerfish." If not, what do DNN users do for SEO so that search engines crawl their site? ...and please don't say Google sitemap, because that only accomodates Google. Please advise. All input is greatly appreciated.

...and by the way, how the heck does that DNN navigation stuff work? What is it doing behind the scenes? I've never seen anything like that before--no anchor tags. Is it JavaScript? What *IS* that?

- John

Sweet! That's exactly the information I was looking for.

Does that Snapsis navigation product render the menus appropriately depending on the visitor's user permissions like the default menu system does? Is it well regarded and stable? Is it popular? Tried and true? I couldn't find it listed in the list of modules at DotNetNuke.com.

If it does a good job, then it is a great solution. Otherwise, a lack of SEO-friendly navigation would be a serious shortcoming.

Thanks again,
John

Yes, the Snapsis CSS NavMenu does all the proper security checking for role permissions just like the default Navigation and it also has several extra properties that you can manually set to get the exact pages in any specific instance.  You can also place multiple instances on the site to do horizontal and vertical navigation at the same time.

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