AJAX Navigation - Does Google Crawl the Links?

[ganeshgrowth]

Does google crawl pages whose navigation links are generated via ajax?

[Receptional Andy]

You need to be clear about what you mean by AJAX here. If you mean the navigation is only accessible via a javascript call which retrieves content from an external (to the page) URL, then it's highly unlikely that call will result in crawling, and even less likely that the implementation will pass value.

Many types of javascript links result in crawling but, IMO not usually in passing of link value. The criticality of internal navigation for search performance means that under no circumstances would I rely on a javascript-only implementation, and less still one that relied on javascript retrieval of external content.

[tedster]

Google now has the technology in place to create a "virtual link" in their database. They can add it to the link map, allowing it to pass the normal varieties of link juice.

I've verified this is the case for navigation that uses form submissions, and I am relatively sure the same approach applies to JavaScript navigation. The key factor, as Andy mentions, is that the JS code must be something that googlebot can deal with, and it's not yet clear what restrictions might be involved.