What are best options for website built with navigation drop-down menus in JavaScript, to get those menus indexed by Google?

[CarlLarson]

This concerns f5.com, a large website with navigation menus that drop down when hovered over. The sub nav items (example: “DDoS Protection”) are not cached by Google and therefore do not distribute internal links properly to help those sub-pages rank well.

Best option naturally is to change the nav menus from JS to CSS but barring that, is there another option? Will Schema SiteNavigationElement work as an alternate?

[Travis_Bailey]

Meh, I guess not. It's just like talking about it to clients or friends. I've made some fine noise with lots of technical words.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Carl - Did you see Travis' thoughtful response to your question?

[Travis_Bailey]

I would generally prefer CSS over JS for navigational elements, but that probably isn't the problem here. Google can crawl JavaScript and attribute links fine. And per SEM Rush, it looks like the site is enjoying a pretty sharp uptick in organic traffic recently. That would seem to be at odds with big indexation problems.

I'm not so sure if it's my network, I'm on a sub par connection now, but I noticed that some CSS and JS files were timing out when I crawled the site. That could lead to a big problem. I would advise that someone check the server log files and see if those files are regularly timing out. Ideally one would want their CSS and JS files combined/concatenated where possible, to reduce the possibility of any such rendering issues.

More on that from SE Roundtable

I checked the cache for the EN version of a few of those pages, and they appear to be cached fine.

cache:https://f5.com/products/security/distributed-denial-of-service-ddos-protection yields, which is pretty much what we want.

http://imgur.com/a/zqsDk

But I do see some problems that could lead to problems with indexation/display. The site has a number of different languages/translations. However, I noticed that the hreflang attribute was missing. It's strongly recommended that hreflang is implemented. You're good on the language meta tag Bing recommends, though.

That would cause some problems, especially on a site that large. I've researched Radware, their competitor, years ago. F5 seems like the type of organization that would pay for a decent translation. (my German and Spanish are so limited, I couldn't discern the quality of the translations) But if it is automatically generated, that would more than likely lead to indexation problems as well.

Another thing I see is that each translation is marked as canonical. This could also cause problems with display and link equity.

Here's more on internationalization from Moz and Google.

I would also look for ways to build internal links to the important products (DDoS Mitigation is supposed to be a huge money maker now.) on the home page, in the body. Not just in boilerplate (nav... footer... etc....) areas.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the mobile menu doesn't appear to directly link important products. I would make sure the experience is the same across devices.