Link text in ASCII

[piskie]

I have just looked at new clients a site for the first time and found link text in ASCII values all over the place.
How does Google view these?
Could they be the cause of a Grey bar PRO?

[TheDave]

when you say ascii, do you mean as an array which is then rebuilt with javascript ie uses charFromCode(), or as html elements, ie @?

edit - also do you mean the href part of the link or the actual text which is displayed?

[piskie]

Yes Dave I domean the full ASCII characters as "@"

These ASCII characters have been used in both the href= and the visible link text.

I don't like the visible link text part in case Google treats it unfavourably with some sort of penalty. As this site has a grey PR bar, I am looking for reasons why and this is one suspect.

The href= bit I think just may not be followed with the file name coded in ASCII and that may be harmless from a penalty point of view.

[piskie]

_/\_/\_BUMP_/\_/\ I hope tis is allowed!

[ginga]

you sure its 'clever' coding and not some pilchard who used frontpage? ;D (seriously, my boss misuses it regularly and rings me up in the middle of the night to rescue his pages. It url%20%encodes everything, but it might ascii encode everything too if used another way?)

My impression is:

grey bar=relax, its just the bot hasn't got round to you yet

white bar=you've been naughty, go and buy a new domain

do they have any backlinks listed anywhere?

[TheDave]

Sorry piskie it dropped so far down and I missed it. I would agree with what ginga has said, grey bar = wait a while and get some inbound links. Frontpage has never converted characters to elements

[piskie]

Thanks for that.
The ASCII was produced by an extension within Dreamweaver. So it was quite deliberate. It is a new site 2 months ish. No links of any consequence yet, but I would still expect an innitial PR of 2 as Googles introductory offer. At least that's what I normaly see when I first upload a site.

As soon as I get some logs to examine, I will see if any spiders are visiting. In the meantime I will convert all the ASCII to conventional text.

If anybody has any further thoughts, I would be grateful.