Best way to do menu bar - javascript or HTML unordered lists?

Hello,

I am thinking about rewriting the menu bar on our web site, http://ianandwendy.com. It's a travel web site with photos, videos and reviews of various countries around the world. The menu is hierarchical, broken up by continent and then by country. Right now, I am using the JS Transmenu which is a mix of HTML for the top level (continents) and javascript for all the subitems/subcategories. I do have continents pages which list all the county links as straight html, so it's possible for a crawler to crawl to the country pages without understanding the JS. It's pretty unmanagable however, and doesn't play nicely with other CSS on the page.

Anyways I'm thinking about changing it to a completely HTML/CSS menu using unordered lists. This would make it much more maintainable, but I'm worried it will affect my keywords for adsense. I don't want adsense to decide that a page about "Denmark" is actually about Mexico, (since there would be a "Mexico" in the content at the top of the page, in the menu bar links). I know that Mexico ads are much higher paying, and the adsense algorithm always serves up the highest paying ads. I already use the google_ad_section keywords to highlight areas in my code that should be weighted higher, but in my experience it's not bulletproof.

Any ideas?

 

Nice site!!
You know that old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Google has you rated at 4 as is. If you did a little SEO, you will go even higher fairly easily. Wait a minute. I changed my mind. On your homepage, holding the cursor over a menu item results in the window opening and closing automatically pretty fast. Trying to click on a country is like trying to hit a moving target. I would definiately fix that. It doesn't seem to be like that on subsequent pages.

Also, you might want to check Google's TOS. I might not be remembering correctly, but I think it is not legal to put an ad right beside an image like you have on your homepage.

Best of luck!!

Zeek

 

Actually, my question is about how to prevent an unordered list menu structure from confusing the context for the page - I still want to have relevent links. What browser are you using? I dont see the same problem with my menu you described.

In regards to the images in between the ads, I'm not sure, I've had that for a long time. The images are just random images from our site, they have nothing to do with the ad themselves, it's just to pretty up the page, so it's not clear to me whether it violates the policy that Google recently just changed, I mean, clarified.

Thanks