JavaScript holding content - SEO implications?

Can spiders read this code?

[Stronkie]

I am analysing a client's website from an SEO perspective and I can see use of JavaScript which looks decidedly dodgy to me:

<script language=JavaScript>
tc_optimise('clientname_HP_Container','<table width..... etc. etc.

this part contains typical page code with tables etc.
and the body of code ends with this

); </script>

This is followed by some <noscript> code with more tables, a bit of content and some spacer.gif files

Please can someone confirm why the page has been created like this? Can search engines pick up the content held within these tags etc.

Cheers

[alfred clarifies]

Hi,

The noscript tag is used to hide the content within the tags in the browser i.e anthing within <noscript>.....</noscript> will not be visible to the browsers.

In your case it totally depends on the kind of content present within these tags. It can very well be used for spamming but i guess google has ways to tackle such spams.

And yes spiders can read a <noscript> tag.

regards,
Alfred

[daveVk]

Unless tc_optimise has some valuable function, it looks very dodgy to me as well. Have you looked at what tc_optimse does, is what is rendered different in anyway from what feed into this function?

Dave

[httpwebwitch]

tc_optimise is an implementation of software by touchclarity. It is used for targeting promotional campaigns.

From the first visit, Touch Clarity Targeting (TCT) starts building a profile of each visitor, and recognizes them using an anonymous first party cookie. Fully automated, the software learns in real-time which content will best achieve a given goal for each visitor and triggers the serving of that content.

source - from their website.

Sounds like it swaps out content to show promotional campaigns based on user profiling.

My gut feeling? probably harmless, since they have content stuffed into <noscript> tags, but all this certainly doesn't *help* SEO.

For a glimpse of what it will do to the engines, find a site using TCT (it's easy - Google "tc_optimise"), and look at it with a LYNX browser.