Search engines and display:none;

[marinaroz]

I've read recently that putting the css property display:none in on an element, as well as visibility:hidden and some other methods of text hiding, result in said text being ignored by search engines.

Now, thinking logically, that makes a lot of sense, since many spam sites would like to exploit the hidden text possibilities to buff up their keywords. But what do you do when there's a legitimate reason to hide part of your content?

I'm thinking dropdown menus. When you have a dropdown menu, all of the subcategories start out hidden, therefore they don't get indexed? A pretty big deal if you ask me.

Do you guys know about this issue and any ways to sidestep it? Does it even matter much?
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[Rashy]

If you are looking for CSS drop down menus A List Apart has some good articles on that, and I am pretty sure the search engines grab the entire menu.
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[Lyth]

I don't know how to deal with that little problem, but I can tell you that you shouldn't give it much thought.

It really doesn't matter whether the search engine indexes the sub-categories of a menu or not; I'm more interested in having it index the content of my pages and not their menus. I could really care less if a search engine misses out on reading information from drop-down menus and only indexes the pages.
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[ClickFanatic]

It might skip over the content in the menu, but it will probably follow the links and index those pages. Not much to worry about, I guess.
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[marinaroz]

So you guys are saying that when a hidden-by-default menu is present, the links contained in this menu will be followed? Because I don't care much whether the menu text is indexed, but it's very important that the links of that menu are followed. If they are not, then basically the site must relay on a visible side menu, or worse, outside links, to be properly indexed, and that would be unacceptable.
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[Lyth]

[ClickFanatic]

For as far as I know, spiders never follow links if the attribute rel="nofollow" is present. Although there might be ones that do anyway, the major search engines do not.
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[img]http://feeds.feedburner.com/sparepencil.1.gif[/img]

[marinaroz]

[spock]

You could start out displaying it, and creating the menu (do the hiding on pageload) using javascript.
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