Javascript links and engines

Do engines follow them

[fig]

I've got a site with lots of pages, each one has the same menu system at the top. I dont want to use frames and I didnt want to change each page when I changed the index so I wrote a .js file which each page imports which just calls a routine to print the header.

All this routine does is spit out a load of image tabs with a link (i.e. document.write('<a href="xxxx"><img src="yyyyy"></a>');.

Have I just limited my site in the search engine world?

[agerhart]

Search engines will not follow JavaScript links.

[fig]

On my main page (/index.html) I've put an HTML link to the sitemap which in turn references each page of the site.

Would this negate the effect or am I better putting the links in each indivisual page?

Also, are links better as "http://xxx.yyy.zzz/page.html" or is "page.html" ok?

[agerhart]

Well, you are not going to benefit from a strong internal linking structure.

>>>Also, are links better as "http://xxx.yyy.zzz/page.html" or is "page.html" ok?

This has been discussed alot, and from personal testing I can say that it doesn't matter. The search engines will follow absolute and relative links.

[fig]

Thanks for you help and advice.

Thinking cap back on........

[Ranger]

TWO QUESTIONS!

1) >>>Also, are links better as "http://xxx.yyy.zzz/page.html" or is "page.html" ok?

.....dang, I was always under the vague impression that coding up every link with the full URL - [etc....] - would somehow show the site referring to itself more often in the server logs? I don't know, for some reason I always thought that was "bad" in some vague way, never explored it.

(That's just one of the frustrations about this line of work: how many of us are self-taught? How many tiny holes are there in our knowledge? Thank god for this forum.)

2) OK. So the .js menu's are out, thanks to search engines, then???

Is there some way to use, I don't know, XML to do that? Adapt a sort of nav menu include into a "regular" HTML page??

I mean we do it all the time w/ CFM, PHP, and ASP. Never used SSI but I know that's do-able, too. There's a bunch of small, still-HTML client sites that it would be handy to use that kind of "nav menu include" on so we wouldn't have to move them to a better server.

Thanks