High PR for home, but remainder of site missing

looking to figure out if onclick causes poor spidering

[didit]

As most of you know, I'm a paid placement guy these days, but a client of mine is having touble getting his site indexed. While the Category and Product URLs are .asp query pages, they aren't the worst Ive seen in formatting and at least they don't have session IDs. There are several asp pages that are without query strings (fairly SE friendly). However, none of the remainder of the site beyond the homepage seems to be indexed.

Could it be that they have fancy rollover navigation that uses onclick as the link:
onClick="location.href='http://www.domain.com/category.asp?catalog=...

I've seen that poorly formatted onclick links can end up being ignored by the Googlebot.

Kevin

[Gus_R]

Hi, if missing pages are linked only by this, surely won't be spidered.

[rogerd]

Google is getting better at finding links embedded in scripts, but I would certainly get some straight text links in there pronto...

[midnightcoder]

yeah, put a simple text copy of the your fancy rollover links @ bottom of page.. it's nothing spammy, good design imo

[daamsie]

A sitemap may be a good idea, if he doesn't want to get rid of the rollovers (which I don't really think would cause a problem, because the 'onclick' attribute is not fundamental to actually being able to follow the link)

[didit]

Thanks All. You validated my hunch.

Surprisingly, there are some normal links on the main page and those don't seem to have gotten spidered either, but I'll try to get a log file to verify.

The main page has a PR of 5 (as measured/estimated by the toolbar), so I would have expected a couple of the sub-pages to at least have some pagerank, and they don't.

I think I can convince the client to drop the rollover onclick and replace it with normal navigation, at least for a test.

Every once in a while even us PPC search folks need to recognize the power of organic SEO and help out the clients. ;-)

[johnnydequino]

It looks like I am in almost the same situation as you.

I have a site that is listed on google, I believe from links.

When I do a search on widgets.com, I get nothing. But when I do a search on widgets, I get some listings.

The homepage of widgets.com has been cached.

Does this mean google does not have it listed yet? I hope so.

jd

[Robert Charlton]

Follow the script with text links inside <noscript> </noscript> tags.

The <noscript> tag is intended to provide alternative content for browsers that cannot execute scripts, and spiders should follow them too. I'd limit the links to the existing links, so there's no appearance of spam.

One problem with mouseover links that I've seen, though, is that they often contain links to all the subpages on the site, so including them all in your <noscript> tags may not be the most strategic distribution of PageRank. My guess is that limiting the <noscript> links to optimized pages only is such a minor infraction, if it is an infraction, that you wouldn't be penalized for being selective about it.