On the last night of the marketing class I was teaching we got into a lengthy discussion on search engine spidering, specifically how to make sure the search engines can follow your links to other pages of your site in order to index them. There are a couple of quick and easy things you can do.
1) Mouse over each link to see if you can see the URL in the bottom left part of your browser.
If you can see your URL (green box) then there is a good chance that the search engines see the link and can follow it. This isn’t the case 100% of the time because information can be added in the link code which will change what displays in the lower corner. This is used to give the link a title, in which case the title displays there or can be used as a means to fool visitors into thinking a link to their site can be spidered… but in the words of Bill S. Preston Esq. “Dude, why would we lie to ourselves?”
I recently had experience with a javascript menu that actually showed the URLs in the bottom corner but the links definitely were not spiderable, so this method is to be taken with a grain of salt no matter what.
2) Another way to check all your links at once is to use a free search engine spider simulator. Type your URL in, submit and see what happens.
If the results show a long list of URLs like the image below then you are in good shape.
If not, then you have some search engine spidering issues that need to be resolved.