does search engines pickup javascript content?

[lindajames]

i display some content using javascript, but i assumed search engines are not javascript compatible so i was thinking of putting a dynamic information in a <NOSCRIPT> tag, will search engines pickup the <NOSCRIPT> tags or do they ignore them? i know that they pickup the <NOFRAMES> tag so i am assuming the pickup the <NOSCRIPT> tag aswell

any suggestions would be appreciated.

cheers
linda

[pixel_juice]

Although the rule of thumb is that search engines don't read javascript, they are working more and more to be able to do this. I believe there was a post recently about Google spidering external javascripts, and for some time Google and Alltheweb have been able to follow certain links created via scripts.

In terms of noscript, search engines will certainly read this content, however it is likely to get a much lesser emphasis (because after all, most visitors will never see it).

So I would say use <noscript>, but don't expect any great impact on rankings ;)

If you are using links in the script, then adding them into the noscript should help search engines find and follow them.

[pmkpmk]

Google seems to pick it up nowadays, even this seems to be experimental:

crawl35.googlebot.com - - [28/Mar/2004:17:49:33 +0200] "GET /jsfunc.validateform.js HTTP/1.1" 200 2572 "-" "Googlebot/Test" "-"