I'm wondering what links are counted by search engine crawlers. The Nav buttons in my left hand menus are coded in Java. They do not show up in the cached text. Does that mean they are NOT followed and DO NOT count as internal links? The sub page list does show up in the cached text. Does that mean Google follows those links? Does it count them as internal links? The SHOPPING CART and ORDER TRACKING links which show up at the top of each of my pages do not appear on the Google cached text. However, they are ranking PR5s so I assume they must be getting some PR from all over the site. Now I'm confused, what do the search engines follow and what do they count as links? Is there a way to tell? _________________ Bobert
Do you mean JavaScript? Java and Javascript are two separate programming/scripting languages. Assuming that's what you mean, it is safest to use HTML links instead of Javascript links, though there has been talk of Google being able to see links, at least simple links, in Javascript. Based on what I have seen with my sites, Google can indeed follow simple links in Javascript. If, however, you have to keep your links in Javascript, then I would suggest putting other alternative HTML links right before or right after the javascript, and enclose those links in noscript tags like this: <noscript> <a href="http://www.digitalpoint.com/">Digital Point</a> <br /><a href="http://forums.digitalpoint.com/">Digital Point Forums</a> ... </noscript> Code (markup): That way, only browsers (and bots) that can't read Javascript will be able to view the alternative links.
The best way to tell is to look at googles text cache of your site. Look at the site in my sig and its text cache, google sees the site totally differently and it is the use of <noscript> tags that allows google to spider the site.
the noscript idea is good. But i would also reccomend creating redundant HTML text links at the bottom of the page. It's useful to the SE's and to your visistors.
Thanks for the insight. It should be safe to assume that whatever shows up on the "cached text" is what Google sees, and whatever is not there isn't followed. Right?
I'm not sure what you mean by <noscript> tags allowing g to spider the site. I have used "no follow" tags to keep the link from showing to G, but I'm not sure what you mean here.
Look at the source code of the site in my sig, I have a javascript menu using code similar to this: <script language="JavaScript1.2" type="text/javascript" src="scripts/menu.js"></script> <noscript> <a href="http://www.noblemarine.co.uk" class="boldcopy">Home</a><BR> <a href="http://www.noblemarine.co.uk/news.php3" class="boldcopy">Noble Marine News</a> | </noscript> HTML: Spiders and people with javascript disabled will see everything between the noscript tags, everybody else sees a fancy menu.