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Does Google spider links in dropdown boxes?

         

londrum

10:07 am on Aug 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've got a section on my site which lets people find their way from A to B. and there are about 300 different places. I've got one page on the site for each possibilty (A to B, A to C, A to D... and then B to C, B to D, B to E... etc) so you can imagine how many different possibilities there are -- roughly 300,000.

It is impractical to link to every single one of these pages internally, there are just too many. so the best way to do it is through a dropdown box.

but i am wondering whether google will give as much weight to a page that is only referenced through a dropdown box, and whether they'd even bother to spider all the different possibilities that the dropdown box can create.

of course, I also have a sitemap which lists all of the different URLs. but i want at least one mention of each URL on my site too.

how would you go about it? would you find a way to include each URL at least once through a normal anchor link?

lucy24

8:56 pm on Aug 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



#1 Google can read javascript.

#2 Google never met a link it didn't like.

Frankly I'd worry about the opposite problem: making sure g### figures out that there are only 300 pages rather than 300,000.

Brett_Tabke

12:44 pm on Aug 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Ya, you hit on it with the site map.

> Google never met a link it didn't like.

So true. Drop a http ANYWHERE on any page an that link will eventually get spidered.

londrum

1:16 pm on Aug 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



its the fact that there are 300,000 different combinations though. if google are faced with 2 dropdown boxes (in the same form) containing 300 places each, would they really try and spider every single combination?

Brett_Tabke

1:46 pm on Aug 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



It is doubtful. Despite reports that G can spider JS, there are few in the real world talking about quality results. The main effect of that JS, is to suss out links to spider.

Even if G does find all those pages, there is zero chance that you are passing PR through that form.