Javascript links and PageRank

Does javascript links are not receiving PR from the main page?

[zoran]

My site shows PR4 for home page, PR3 for pages text-linked from this, and PR0 for pages linked with javascript (window.open).
Does Google not "distribute" PR along javascript links?

[Macro]

Apparently not. Knowledgeable webmasters here have advised me to put external URLs in js IF I want to prevent them benefitting from PR (i.e. in cases when they don't link back to me)

[tribal]

In other words, make sure you have hard non-JS links to those documents somewhere on a page that is spiderable.

[zoran]

Thanks Macro, thanks tribal.

Just to complete this, could we define "spiderable links"?

I mean, every link somewhere in the page that could be seen by the visitor it's ok.
How about hidden links, links w/o text/images between <a> </a> tags, or links in HTML comment etc?
Which are followed by spiders, and which not? And which are considered spam?

Thanks for your posts so far.

[tribal]

In general, a spiderable link would be a hard link (e.g. <a href="http//www.somesite.com">some site</a>) that is located between the start and end body tags of your page.

A hidden link should be spiderable, depending on how it is made invisible. E.g. if you write the link dynamically using JavaScript, the spider will not see the link as it was not in the document when it requested it.

[zoran]

I've just realized I have "hard non-JS links" in the "site map", which is linked from home and others page...

My Homepage has PR4, every other pages (except those linked with JS in the menu) are cross-linked, hardlinked w/o Javascript and have PR3, even site map page.

But pages linked from a Javascript menu and also hardlinked (w/o javascript) from site map have PR 0?

That means I just have to wait for PR to spread through "site map" page?

(My PR4 rank for "home" is quite new, about 1 month)

[Macro]

That means I just have to wait for PR to spread through "site map" page?

Yes

[tribal]

Yes, indeed it can take a long time before a page gets a visual pagerank in the Google Toolbar.

Just be patient. If youre page is indexed it will get a visual pagerank sooner or later.

Regards,

Tribal

[zoran]

ok I'm gonna wait (actually I got work to do meantime :)

thanks for your quick reply

[MonkeeSage]

Bad (uncrawlable):

<a href="javascript:window.open('blah.htm', '', '');">link</a>

----

Bad (uncrawlable):

<a href="#" onclick="window.open('blah.htm', '', ''); return false;">link</a>

----

Good (crawlable):

<a href="blah.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href, '', ''); return false;">link</a>

Jordan

[zoran]

Hi MonkeeSage, I just want to be sure I got the point.
You mean if the URL is hard-coded in href like

<a href="blah.htm" ...

then the link is crawlable (I mean the "blah.htm" page will be crawled, no matter what other javascripts are attached - onClick etc ...)?

[MonkeeSage]

Oops, wasn't very clear...when I said 'crawlable' I meant that the big G would be able to read the link and would count it when it calculates PR; they may never actually crawl the page it points to, but they will be able to read the link and know it is a valid link. The key is the href attribute. If it points to a valid location then Google will understand it (regardless of any other attributes like onclick). but if the href has Javascript or "#" then Google will just ignore it (or mabye even treat it like a dead link, not sure).

Jordan

[zoran]

thanks, now it's clear for me too :)