Does Web crawler simulate user behavior?

Question

Structuring the web pages' content or schema properly is important for SEO. I would like to know if popular web crawlers or bots (Google bot, Bingbot etc...) are able to simulate user behavior and index the pages accordingly.

For example, if I have a navigation menu with hidden sub menus which will be visible only when a user does something (such as mouseover) on a main menu item. Will a bot do the same? Will those sub menu items or hidden links be indexed or is it just enough to have those links included in sitemap.xml?

I also want to know if crawlers wait for document.ready or window.load.

Please enlighten me.

Answer 1

Most good search engine crawlers (i.e. Googlebot) can process JavaScript, JQuery, etc. and render websites just like a user sees them. These crawlers will be able to crawl your menu and sub-menu items. Use best practices, though, so as not to run into cloaking problems such as using "hidden" tags.