I'm trying to increase my google PR, but I am concerned that google may not be indexing my JavaScript based navigation system. Take a look at the site http://www.goldfiles.com Right under the logo, at the top, there is my horizontal navigation bar. Would something like that get spidered?

I am concerned cause of what google cached: http://64.233.167.104/custom?q=cache:dGhX3MUeX0EJ:www.goldfiles.com/+goldfiles.com&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

A popup error appears even though the nav bar is registered.

Do you think those links and keywords are spidered by google?

Thanks in advance for any comments/suggestions,

Ben

No, it doesn't. JavaScript is a client-side language (it is rendered at the browser, not the server) and is not seen by any search engine of which I am aware.

This is perhaps the biggest drawback of using DHTML menus - their inherent lack of alternative navigation, which often the designer must supply by hand. I didn't see the navigation to which you were referring at first - I had to enable JS. It is for reasons of visitor usability and search engine indexing that the W3C lists having viable <noscript> content as a Priority 1 checkpoint. Here's a link in case anyone cares to read it (it's about three sentences, under 6.3) http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/#gl-new-technologies

HTH!

Paul H

Thanks, that answered my question.

I believe I have a sufficient link structure other than the javascript based nav bar. What does everyone think about my link structure?

I am also considering making a "site map" and placing a link to that at the top of my page (in text above the logo).

You should think about having a small text only navigation on the bottom of the page.

If you only have the links in a site map Google will only see them linked once and thus it will badly affect the rankings given to those pages.

True, but if you look at my content pages, they each have linked text on them, such as:

Home > Freeware > Mouse Pointers > 3D Mouse Pointer Collection

That is a pretty decent linking system I think.

google may not be indexing my JavaScript No, it doesn't

Right, but I believe they are already testing a Javascript reading robot.
The main thing being detecting Javascript redirects from doorways.
In your case, as previously said, you can double your JS up with text based linking.

A JS-reading robot will come and go in about a week, when SEs realize just how easily sites can take advantage of them. You could have JS generated content that randomly rotates on every visit, hide it any number of ways from visitors (SE bots don't know what's hidden and what is not), and now your site will look like it's being updated every day when it's not. You'll have an SE feeding frenzy. This is just one idea. There are thousands more we could all probably brainstorm.

hmm :confused:

Originally posted by the_pm
No, it doesn't. JavaScript is a client-side language (it is rendered at the browser, not the server) and is not seen by any search engine of which I am aware.
say what???? javascript is client side... and in this case, googlebot is the client. Without a doubt search engine bots see javascript code. But most of them aren't programmed to be able to understand the code. However, like 777 said, Google does seem to be trying to "teach" their bots to read js. I wouldn't be surprised to see googlebot following js links in the next 6 months.

Originally posted by the_pm
A JS-reading robot will come and go in about a week, when SEs realize just how easily sites can take advantage of them. You could have JS generated content that randomly rotates on every visit, hide it any number of ways from visitors (SE bots don't know what's hidden and what is not), and now your site will look like it's being updated every day when it's not. You'll have an SE feeding frenzy. This is just one idea. There are thousands more we could all probably brainstorm. are you kidding? search engines wouldn't want to read javascript because you could use it to have random text that only shows up for their bots? you can already do that with simple PHP. or ASP. or CGI. and there currently is no "SE feeding frenzy" that i'm aware of.

are you kidding? search engines wouldn't want to read javascript because you could use it to have random text that only shows up for their bots? you can already do that with simple PHP. or ASP. or CGI. and there currently is no "SE feeding frenzy" that i'm aware of.
Very good point, blackdog. You can preprocess pretty much whatever you want, including random content. In fact, a preprocessor should be even more convincing to an SE, since it outputs HTML, not a script.

What puzzles me the most about SEs indexing JavaScript is the question of whether they will index based on the script itself or the output on the screen. This is a question that's been asked many a time. I believe it would have to attempt to index the code, since most SEs rely on proper markup to help determine rankings. Otherwise, how would they know they are looking at titles, heading tags and alt information on images? So, how would an SE parse any meaning out of JavaScript, given the fact that JS on a Web page is delivered as a script, not as HTML? And how would it rank and weight external scripts? What if someone simply links to an external script with tons of SE-rich content and simply never bothers to write it into a page. Or legitimately keeps scripts external, and each page only calls a small portion of them? Does each page get the full weight of all the scripts? I'm just stumped to figure out how this could work, be fair and not be easily exploited.

I think I'll devise some sort of experiment. Two sites launched at the same time. One has a ton of info and links, one gets a new, random paragraph of info everytime (through a preprocessor) with the same set of links. Then watch stats to see how frequently each one gets indexed.