Image Map Href

Can a SE 'bot follow a link through an imagemap?

[Victoria_B]

Does using an imagemap based navigation system increase the difficulty posed to search engines when crawling a site?

Victoria x

[Jon_King]

No. Read here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Also, to be sure test on the sim spider:
[searchengineworld.com...]

[bruhaha]

No SE problems with an imagemap, but there may be other reasons to consider an alternative approach.

Specifically, if you would like the distinct areas of the map to change (e.g., be highlighted) on mouseover, you can't do this with an old-fashioned imagemap (and I assume that is what you're referring to). But it can be done rather easily with CSS.

(One warning: the CSS approach likely won't work in Netscape 4.x browsers. If you want to provide older browsers with something similar, you would need to use a little Javascript.)