I need visible javascript links

How can I make javascript links visible to the google bot?

[Herenvardo]

I'm working in a site with a menu entirely made with javascript. We made it so to avoid using frames, but I'd like to make the links visible to the google bot, so it can crawl in all the pages of the site. Is there some way to do it?

[Brett_Tabke]

If you use standard http: in your javascript - gb will follow the links.

[Herenvardo]

"standard http: in your javascript"
Can you explain this better? Until not much time ago, I've worked only with HTML and letting my software upload the pages for me, so I don't know too much 'bout http or javascript (the menu is not made by me)

[takagi]

I think Brett means putting 'http://' at the start of the link so linking to WW should not be 'www.webmasterworld.com' but 'http://www.webmasterworld.com'

P.S.
Ignore all the single qoutes in this message!

[sublime1]

A follow-on question: I have links like <a href="javascript:openSpecialWindow('http://widget.com')">Link to another special window</a>

The openSpecialWindow js function does some stuff to open a new window at the right size, etc.

Will google still find this link?

Thx

[Herenvardo]

Sorry! I forgot to tell that all the javascript code is in an external file! Somthing like this:
<script language="JavaScript" src="nav.js"></script>
All references to the other pages in the site are in this file, so the homepage has no links.
Can I make that googlebot spiders the site without loosing functionallity?
Thanks :)

[TravelMan]

Why not use the <noscript> tag?

<noscript>

link.htm
link2.htm

etc

</noscript>

[Wuschelbuschel]

... or make a direct link from the homepage to a sitemap.

[Marcia]

There are some people changing from JS links to something similar in CSS for effect just because it's simpler.

[tedster]

To add to Brett's comment, a Google engineer named Matt Cutts who was at our Boston Conference mentioned that Google is trying very hard to find all the pages it can. So in doing this, they will take javscript that is on an HTML page and look for a URL in it. They don't execute the script, they just look at it as text. But if there's a character string there that looks like it might be a URL (starts with [)...] then they will try to access that page.

He wasn't clear about whether this kind of crawling would pass on PR the way an HTML link will. But for now it does require that the js is on the page, not in an external file.

One organization I consult with put up a new website several months that uses exactly the technique you're talking about. Their inner pages have not been crawled and I don't expect that they will be within the near future.

[GeorgeGG]

I have been using a JS link in a src type file with a full
URL, 'src=http://.....' for about 3 years without any SE
indexing/accessing the page.

something similar in CSS

Will a SE follow CSS links?

GeorgeGG

[tedster]

Yes, if they are regular links in a div whose visibility toggles on and off with a click or mouseover. Some DHTML menus do this very nicely, but others insist on burying the links in javascript arrays, so that's no better.