Forum Moderators: open
Rumors from the Pub Conference say that Google now has or will shortly have the ability to spider JavaScript links. How would this affect sites that have a large JS menu with 100+ links? Will Google stop at 100 links in the menu and ignore additional links in the menu plus whatever other links are on the page? If a JS menu has 100 links, will PR fail to pass because the 50th non-JS link is now the 150th link on the page?
This could wreak havok to everyone's reciprocal linking strategies. Yikes!
Ted
At PubCon, Matt Cutts said something like "the fact that a page has an http:// link inbetween script tags says something interesting about that page". I am paraphrasing here, but he didn't say much more than that on this (if someone remembers more, please post).
I DO NOT take this to mean that Google would be spidering js links soon. And I am not going mind-read what he was thinking.
My advice is not to worry about it.
This does not necessarily mean that all these type of url's will be spidered, indexed, counted and shown as backlink. It just means they could add something to Google's algo, spidering or index in some way.
Personally, on the javascript issue, I think Google is most disturbed about the javascript redirects with hidden text and links.
> 100 links
I specifically asked Matt what the story was on that and he said it was a guideline and that perhaps the 101 kb size limit for indexing within Google would have been better advice.
You aren't going to get banned or anything like that, but my impression from listening to Matt Cutts was that links in JS and Plain Text will most likely be indexed to some extent in the future.
I suspect this will be somewhat gradual and not immediate or drastic - similar, but different, to the way the have been going deeper and deeper into dynamic websites.
Google will change in the future - google cares about the user - if they think the time and effort in doing this will increase the user experience (I think it will if done correctly) - then go to it.
I just can't wait to hear the whining as I already can imagine what some people will do to "take advantage" of this when and if they start doing it.
What a fun day it will be at webmaster world.
I think you misunderstood me.
Let's say another webmaster has a dynamic JS based menu with links to 100 different internal pages. On the page in question, this webmaster has posted a standard link with no tricky redirects or JS as a reciprocal link to my site. Not counting the menu links (the way it is now), my link would be #50 on the page and I would benefit from the PR of their page. If Google decided to count the menu links first, then the link pointing to my site would drop to #150 (100 links from the menu and then 50 until my link appears). As the Google guidelines recommend 100 links or less to a page, I was wondering if all PR benefits would be lost, as the link is essentially pushed down the page, past the point where Google would recognize it.
In no uncertain terms am I implying anything that would be perceived as unethical linking or hiding anything that may be perceived as spam.
Ted
