Can Googlebot Crawl Usemap Area Links?

[stathis]

Hello guys. I need your help on something.

I am using a splash page for entering my website. The body of the index page looks something like this

<div align="center"><img src="pic.jpg" style="z-index:1; border-width:0px;" alt="Some text" usemap="#m_splash"></img>
</div>

<map name="m_splash">
<area shape="rect" coords="275,246,508,352" href="http://www.mydomain.com/index1.php" title="Page Title" alt="Some Text Here" />
</map>

I have daily visits from googlebot on this page, but for more than a month i didn't see googlebot through my logs to visit any other pages on my website.
Does it have a problem with the code above? Please help :)

[kaled]

If Googlebot is visiting this page daily then why not change it to something simpler. If Googlebot then spiders the rest of your site (or at least goes further) then you may have found the answer. Whatever anyone might say in this forum, you have the power to experiment, so you may as well do so.

I seem to recall that Brett said that staying within HTML 3 specs is a good idea for robots. That's probably going a bit far but you must certainly make sure that robots can find all the pages you want indexed via pure, static, HTML links. By all means use javacript links and more advanced stuff in your site but don't assume that Google will follow such links. You should also make sure your critical pages are validated.

Check these urls
[webmasterworld.com...]
[google.com...]

Kaled.

[stathis]

Kaled i think the splash page was the problem. I tried to access it with a text browser (Lynx) and guess what :) It could not access any other pages from there. I think it's ok now. I have to wait for googlebot and see what happens. Thanks for all your help

[abates]

Google follows usemap links fine on my site... They show up in the backlinks as well.

[dpplgngr]

interesting... this is not the case for me. i have a site with 1000's of map links that have never been walked by googlebot