Google ranking affected by .js?

Was my site lowered because I added a .js menu?

[mugatu]

I'm suspicious but unsure-since the update started my site moved up to 6 from 7 until last night when my cache was updated to reflect the new index with a .js external menu, at which point it dropped to the 3rd page of results. I placed all original text links in <noscript> tags, so I dropped no content.
Is this just a coincidence?
-thanks for any help on this.

[glengara]

i'd have thought if you'd made sure your links were spiderable, it is a coincidence, or at least not related to the JS menu.

[mugatu]

Hi,

Thanks for answering! Yup, I ran it through the Sim Spider tool & the links are all spiderable.
Hmm, ok.

[hyperion]

Google spiders noscript, but maybe they decided to give less weight to them, since it can be used for spamming - and if it's possible, it's done :-(. After all, if your links are in <noscript>, google knows that it sees something 90% of your users won't.
Better use a sitemap, or, better still, drop the js menu and go with plain html, js-menues are a bad idea anyway, imho.

[mugatu]

Point well taken. I've researched & read as much as I can find about this issue, it's a bummer that there is no way to be sure.

[NFFC]

I haven't seen any change in how noscript is treated for links. Dumping a lot of JS on the page and then adding noscript as well will increase the size of the page, or to look at it another way the content to HTML ratio will decrease.

[mugatu]

Hi, thanks for your experienced opinion. I didn't add much, just a couple of lines that pull 'exmplmenu_var.js' off the server:

<script type='text/javascript'>

function Go(){return}

</script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='exmplmenu_var.js'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='menu_com.js'></script>

Yes, my page size has increased slightly but I can bring it down again. Do you consider this alot?

[mugatu]

Well, my page has increased 2k. So maybe the soloution (if there is a problem) is balance w/ more content?

[NFFC]

>2k

I doubt it is that, looks to me that as far as the SE is concerned the page has hardly altered.

Did you use a find & replace function to make the changes to the pages?

[mugatu]

No, I did it manually.

[NFFC]

You win :)

I only have two sites that uses noscript for links, on one no changes at all to the site, no changes at all in rank.

On the other changes were made via find and replace to the JS menu, this dropped almost exactly as in your case.

I have an unhealthy paranoia about sites where all the pages show the same creation date

[mugatu]

Interesting.

>I have an unhealthy paranoia about sites where all the pages show the same creation date

Yeah, this is not the case for my site.
I guess I just got lowered for other reasons, thanks for the input!