I have a page that is automatically refreshed with a javascript onchange event on a drop down box. My first question: will SEs be able to follow the links? I don't think they can My second: I'd like the SEs to be able to crawl the pages, so what if I hard coded the links in a div and eithe made the div invisible or placed it outside the boundries of the apge using a CSS class Last alternative would be a sitemap page I suppose where all the various drop down options are hard coded......
I'd have hard-coded links in addition to the box & JS- even if you put them small at the bottom of the page. Not everyone enables/has Javascript.
Assume your page is white. What if you just styled the link to be white text on a white background, and no text decoration? Then humans couldn't see it, but the search engines would pick it up. You'd also have to place the link somewhere on the page where the odds of a visitor moving their mouse over it (and detecting it) would be small. Why are you considering doing this? Has a friend twisted your arm into passing some PR on to him for a site that has nothing to do with your own?
Don't serious search engines penalize sites for hiding links? If I understand what you are doing, search engines are just going to the primary instance of the page. You don't want to be peppering this with hidden links. Some will detect that and your SER may be affected. If, on the other hand, you are trying to deal with links that are normally hidden from the main page, Google Sietmaps is a way to m,ake sure Google, at least, is indexing those pages.
Yeah you should never hide your links, its called SE manipulation. Find another way, even if you post a static link menu too that is visible. It is much better then risking a penalty. Brad
Thanks for the suggestions all. The hidden links one makes me shiver..... I'm going to put the links in the sitemap page.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned using <noscript> tags, which is what I use. The stuff inside <noscript> tags only get shown to users who have Javascript disabled, so whenever you have navigation or anything else in Javascript, just put alternative code for non-Javascript browsers in <noscript></noscript> tags. Doing so will help both users with JS disabled and spiders...
Don't do this unless you want to get banned! Hidden links are a NO NO, so don't do it! iShop: A quick way might be to view the source for the page in question. Just go to View -> Source in Internet Explorer and see if the link tags like "<a href='www.site.com'>Site.com</a>" appear in the HTML. If they do, they should be picked up by the SEs as this is what they should be seeing. If they don't, then they won't. Regards, dfsweb
Thanks dfs- They don't appear. It's a dynamic page refreshed by an onchange event on a drop down list that submits a form variable to filter results. So there is no hardcoded link to any of the pages accessible by changing the drop down box. I listed the drop down options as hard coded links on the site map page.
it is best to not try to hide links. It will likely be discovered sooner or later (someone reports it). With that said, i have seen a way to hide a link by using an image as the background, and then configure the text or link with the same color as the image. Given search engines cannot yet read image content, the text could be spidered without penalty, until a competitor reports it.
Or, you could NOT do it, not taking any chances by doing anything that's against the rules and just work a little harder! Although I must say, this is quite an original idea. However, I wouldn't recommend doing it (or any other dodgy activity, for that matter)
In my experience of hiding links with <div> off the page via css, it has worked fine. The site has been online for a year and is not penalized in any of the 3 big SEs. Although, I only hide 1 link. Have any of you guys tried it first hand, or are you just saying that to be safe?
It's one of the techniques that are blacklisted by the search engines, so I haven't tried it nor will I ever do. I doubt that any of the regular members here would have ever tried to do this.