Are Javascript buttons spiderable?

[hpops]

I have Javascript rollover buttons on my website - will these links be picked up by search engines when spidered?

thanx

[tonyww]

no.

[danmccarthy]

can someone clarify here? my understanding was that spiders mostly ignored javascript (except maybe to catch some black hat SEO?) and that any "<a href" type links will be spidered just fine.

I suppose hpops could be talking about some other type of javascript button that i'm not familiar with, but I assumed we were talking about an image/button, that serves as a link, that has an alternate image/button that is displayed via javascript "onmousover".

here's an example of what I assume WOULD be spidered. Can anyone confirm or deny my prior assumption?

<a href="index.html" onmouseout="MM_swapImgRestore()" onmouseover="MM_swapImage('Image1','','frames-shad-bw.jpg',1)"><img src="frames-shad.jpg" name="Image1" width="215" height="215" border="0" id="Image1" /></a>

[hpops]

That's exactly what I was talking about dan - please someone put me out of my missery and tell us either way! Please please

[danmccarthy]

Anyone?

[tristo]

that should be OK. It's html and spiders will read it. Java script menus are a problem when the links are hidden inside the script tags.

[jaffstar]

IMHO NO.

[Dave_A]

Hi I know that my search engine cannot follow pure Java links and from what I understand about web spiders is that they can index java pages but I don't think they can follow purely java links.
I have spidered a few web sites designed using Net objects fusion which has java enabled buttons and the spider can index those with no problems.
My robot went to a web site that tracks web robots and they have a file on the sever that only has java links and my spider missed it if I recal, but I am not sure if it was because of the depth I was spidering the web site at, or the number of links per page settings I was using.
Html doesn't have a problem being spidered and web spiders follow that easily perhaps, you could see if Google manages to spider it using the famous Googlebot.

[Wail]

Dave_A, I don't want to be seen to be picking on you, I'm not, but there's a big and important difference between Java and JavaScript.

It's best to pretend there's no relation between Java and JavaScript at all. I'll never understand why they renamed LiveScript as JavaScript. I suspect it was bandwagon jumping.

Why don't search engines follow JavaScript functions? They could easily end up in loops. They might start submitting data to websites too and that would be awful. Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp and even Henry are supposed to read websites - not interact with them. You wouldn't want spiders interacting with forms for the very same reason.

[stever]

>>That's exactly what I was talking about dan - please someone put me out of my missery and tell us either way! Please please

Yes.

<comment>Most of the concern about general dhtml comes from a) usability (where some studies show that dhtml navigation is less user-friendly - I believe tedster wrote some posts on this) and b) pure javascript menus where the links are encoded in the script, which traditionally have led to problems (although see some threads here where some people believe that search engines are also identifying URLs in javascript). A link such as the one that dan supplied and that hpops is concerned about proves no barrier to spiders since it is only using javascript to style effects on a plain html link.</comment>

[danmccarthy]

Thanks Stever, for an explaination instead of a simple yes or no. This thread was taking a serious turn for the worst even BEFORE someone jumped in with something about Java. Now I can safely ignore whatever shows up here.

[sincraft]

I know personally, after having a clients site up for about 8 months now, the only pages being indexed in yahoo are the ones where the spider can find straight html tags. Our contact us, reseller program, and about us pages are the highly ranked ones. The ones with other links inside those links are ranked lower. The HOME link, and all other links are not indexed AT ALL in the search engines.

So NO - a java menu will not get you indexed. You should put up a sitemap link somewhere at the top of your code so that it will crawl through those means instead of relying on basic html randomness.

S

[Wail]

Not to sound too anal - we're not talking about Java, we're talking about JavaScript.

(And spiders crawl neither JavaScript nor Java dependant links)

[Webtoolpros]

Major search engines don't like java or flash. They see it, but may not index it. From experience, some of my sites with java or flash don't get high rankings or are indexed.

Try to aim for pure html coding to make your web pages search engine friendly