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We do have several pages on the site that have more than 100 internal links. These are clearly and cleanly listed and are not designed to try to get better indexing, etc., but rather for making navigation easier for our users.
So, to adhere to the Google guidelines, but still keep our site user-friendly, now I am looking at making these links work through Javascript. Does anyone know if the following structure will stop Google from considering these as the type of links they mean are considering the 100 links per page criteria?
I've heard that Google doesn't follow javascript links, but it does seem that the links would be easily read by Google because the url is right there, so I wonder if this will work:
Here is the sample code:
<script>
function go(e){
window.location=(e.options[e.selectedIndex].value);
}
</script> <select name=go onclick="go(this)">
<option value="h**p://www.ourdomain.com/url1.html">Country1</option>
<option value="h**p://www.ourdomain.com/url2.html">Country2</option>
<option value="h**p://www.ourdomain.com/url3.html">Country3</option>
Etc.
</select>
Should I be doing this in another way to make sure that Google or search engines such as Yahoo don't think we're trying to over-optimize?
Thanks in advance for any help or insights anyone can provide...
I generally structure my sites to be user-friendly first and foremost as Google suggests, but I still also have to live with their guideline that a maximum of 100 links on a page is reasonable, and the implication that they don't like pages with more than 100 links and thus it would add some negative weighting for the SERPS of the page if it exceeds their limits... (Interesting that major sites like Yahoo and others often have pages with more than 100 links though).
It may not work with the rumblings of a JS parsing testbot, but anyway.....
<script>
document.write('
<select name=go onclick="go(this)">
<option value="h**p://www'+'.'+ourdomain.com'.+.'/url1.html">Country1</option>'); etc. etc.
</script>
Also it will stop it being counted as a backlink and there will be no anchor text passed or no other goodies ;)
Over-optimise, more like de-optimise. If you are planning on doing this on your own site don't forget that you will also stop the flow of PageRank to these pages.
Thanks for this important point. In addition to the drop down box on all of the pages that uses the cgi script, I still do have a standard link on all of the pages to the single page that does include the regular list of links. Kind of like a site-map page.
So, now I no longer have the identical list of 100+ links on all of the thousand plus pages of the site, eventhough it is user-friendly.
So the user can now use the drop-down list to find the specific categories (still user friendly), or if they don'tlike drop-down lists, they can still link to the single page that has the full list of standard html navigation links (and google can too). That single page lists the first 80 - 90 links and continues on another page to keep below the 100 google limit.
In this case, wouldn't I still get the benefits of having all of the links to the pages, since google can still follow the trail to all of the pages?
It does catch my attention though when Google does mention something so specific in their guidelines:
h**p://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
I would guess that it's just one factor among hundreds, but I would expect it would have to factor in somehow since they so specifically mention it.
It would be interesting to see what others think about this...
See how search-engine friendly your site is, can the spider crawl it easily? Will it get good rankings?
