Does Google follow Javascript links now?

Larry Page quotation

[kalthoff]

Hi everybody,

I have a Larry Page quotation here in which he says "We added the ability to search for code in more than 40 different programming languages..." ( [googlewatchblog.de...] ). Does that mean that mean that Google might also follows Javascript links now?

Frank

[edited by: tedster at 9:33 am (utc) on June 25, 2007]
[edit reason] make link live [/edit]

[tedster]

Google may crawl the URL in a javascript link, but I have yet to see any evidence that a javascript link contributes to PR or other kinds of backlink influence. I'm pretty sure that Google just stores code as a text-only character string, they don't parse it for algorithmic page scoring.

[fishfinger]

I've had a test page up for 1 year optimised for a unique nonsense phrase. The link to it is imported via Javascript document.write - Google has not indexed the page.

Perhaps if the code was on the page they could - I'll need set up a different test.

[phranque]

i didn't try translating and reading the posted link, but perhaps larry page was referring to google code search [google.com].

[SEOold]

Few months back I had an issue with my pages on Google news. The bot was crawling other links on the page as they should but the pages were irrelevant to News. When I contacted Google and I pointed out the issue and resolution (replace links with JS) they requested that I please do this so Google bot will no longer crawl these links. After this I no longer had an issue. So I'm confident that if anything changed I would notice the issue again which I have not. Hope this helps.

[lavazza]

Add another vote to the 'I don't think so' camp

I had a couple of sites with js navigation menus

The index pages of both sites ranked highly with Google but NONE of the other pages even registered

Workaround: I converted the js menus into regular html on the index pages and within a week or so, Google had them all on record :)

Now, of course, any updates have to be made in TWO places... <grr>

[Robert Charlton]

The Larry Page quote is very clearly about searching for code, not about following javascript links....

My emphasis:

Since users are interested in many types of information, we expanded our search index to include new types of content. We added the ability to search for code in more than 40 different programming languages and indexed more than 7 million U.S. patents....