By-Passing JavaScript and SWF

Placing code to by-pass JavaScript and SWF's so Search Engines don't stop

[mgilvey]

Greetings all. I'm a newby here and I generally try to avoid messing with code if at all possible becuase I'm a neophyte when it comes to that. So try and use words of one sylable when replying to me ;-)

I read today on Google's website:
[google.com...] (Technical Guidlines, first bullet)

..to use a Lynx browser to view pages to get an idea of how SE's see web pages. It mentions that "fancy features" such as javascript, dhtml, flash files etc. might keep the browser from viewing the rest of the page. If this is true and if search spiders get caugth up on this, that would certainly effect several million websites because the natural tendency in page design is to put these types of things at the top of the page either graphically or in the code.

My question is, is there a piece of code that can be put in somewhere that tells the spider to look at the entire page and or jump to the text content that is further down on the page? Oh, if there is, is it Google frienly and compliant (no cheating).

I've heard of something, possibly related to this for 502 compliancy where there is a piece of code that will tell the visiting text reader to skip everything in the head tag or something like that but I haven't tried it and don't know if it is realated to my question above.

Mark

[mrMister]

"fancy features" such as javascript, dhtml, flash files etc. might keep the browser from viewing the rest of the page.

You are incorrect, it doesn't say that. These "fancy features" can prevent a spider from viewing the rest of your site

It's talking specifically about spiders (although some of it is true for other user agents too).

The issue here is that if you have your web site navigation links in JavaScript or Flash, spiders will have difficulty finding the links contained within them, and if they can't find the links, they can't follow them to get to other pages in your site.

A quick solution is to place a HTML nbavigation block in <noscript> tags, which JavaScript compatible user agents will ignore (meaning only non-javascript user agents will see them)

<noscript>
<a href="page1.html">Page 1</a><br>
<a href="page2.html">Page 2</a><br>
<a href="page2.html">Page 3</a><br>
etc...
</noscript>

An alternative is to put an HTML site map on your site and link to it with an HTML link from your home page.

[mgilvey]

Thanks for replying so quick. Perhaps I've confused myself, for me, the issue isn't whether the spider will see the links in JS or SWFs and follow them (I know it won't do that), the issue is whether once the spider gets to these, will it stop even if there is other HTML text and HTML HREFs further down the page.

Another way of saying this, do JSs and SWFs act like a blockade keeping the spider from moving further down the page thereby stopping the spider from searching the page any further or does the spider go past these things and continue reading the rest of the page.

I do use sitemaps and I have text links at the bottom of the page.

I think I got that right, now.