Here's one that's got me stumped. Surfing around, I came across a web site where doing the usual "view source" gives you standard HTML, but doing "view rendered source" (or "view generated source") reveals about 10 links at the bottom of this site's homepage to the company's main competitor sites! What is the purpose of this? Is there some possible SEO benefit here? Note that I'm using a Firefox plugin called Web Developer Toolbar. This has a feature to view not the source from the web server, but the HTML source AFTER the browser has done any javascript-based DOM/HTML manipulations to it. The links here ONLY show in the generated source, so I don't think spiders would even see them. And since they're outbound links to competitor websites, I really haven't a clue - I don't think they'd want to pass any PR to them! Maybe they're just f*ing with their competitors? Maybe they're hoping that Firefox users 'prefetch' those links and their competitors see a bunch of referrals in their logs and say 'WTF'?? Anyways, here is the website in question: www.omniture.com ... try viewing the regular source, and then try viewing the generated source and look at the very bottom of the code... Stumped, LC
Which links are generated with javascript? Did you view the page with a lynx viewer - did the links show up in the lynx view?
No, the links don't show up in the source HTML. They're being put in through DHTML, so you have to view "rendered source". See attached screenshot, which comes from "www . omniture . com". The rendered links I'm referring to are highlighted in grey. LC
If i cant see them and google cant see them? Whats the point? Who can see them? Are these links only for people who are logged-in to the site?
Here's my theory... crawlers don't see those links there, but browsers do, and its possible that Google Toolbar, Alexa Toolbar, etc., transmit some type of data about the page. This feeds into "related site" information (i.e. Google 'related:http://www.sane.com/'), so that people looking for sites relating to their competitors are more likely to see this particularly site listed.
Hello, you can see the Javascript generated source and links with the tracer tool http://www.netamo.com/tracer It processes the page as the browser does, compiles every javascript function. It has some limitations (browser-specific issues) but it can help you in the most cases. We appreciate feedback as the tool is under development, beta version. Thanks