Does GoogleBot follow hotspot map links?

or does it just not follow them that often?

[Drumat5280]

Does GoogleBot follow hotspot map links?

<map name="test" id="test" >
<area shape="rect" coords="431,301,506,322" href="http://www.example.com/default.asp?t=16">
</map>

[miedmark]

I don't see any reason why not. href is href.

[tedster]

My recent experience with an under-indexed site someone brought to me, is that <map> links do not get crawled and indexed the same way that <a> links do. I don't know why either, except perhaps for the creative "hidden link" spam that has occasionally gone on with image maps.

My advice is always to have an <a> element with a straight href link (no js) argument for any link you want the search engines to treat as a link.

[Drumat5280]

Thanks Tedster, that was kind of what I was thinking.

[carlr]

I have a website here with only an image map in index.html as link to the rest of site. All pages are indexed correctly. Inbound links only to index.html

It works.

Hope this helps

[tedster]

Excellent to hear that, carlr. I have only this one site to study on the subject, and I know that's not a big enough sample to generalize from (to put it mildly).

Do your inner pages get crawled frequently? Does PR pass to internal pages?