how good is javascript menu for SEO

[souravamant]

I was reading few articles on SEO, I read that js menu are not good for SEO. How true it is.

Thanks

[sonjay]

It's true.

[tedster]

Think about it this way. JavaScript is a client-side technology. It does not run on the server, the individual user agent needs to execute it. Now, if you ran a spider, would you run just any old code on your machine automatically -- code that you might find anywhere at all on the web? Oviously that would not be "safe spidering".

If you want to be sure that your pages get found, then link to them with straight html. If you want to see anchor text influence helping the target page show up on relevant search results, then you need straight html links. If you want PageRank (or any search engine's measure of link popularity) to affect target pages, you need a straight html link.

[edited by: tedster at 8:16 pm (utc) on April 23, 2006]

[Robert Charlton]

And, in addition to the SEO considerations, which tedster covers in his excellent comments, also consider the user. For security reasons, many surfers and companies run with javascript turned off. I suggest that you never depend on javascript for navigation.

If you're in a situation where you're absolutely stuck with javascript menus on a site, you might consider adding straight html links within a <noscript> tag, but that is liable to look pretty ugly to visitors who do have javascript turned off. (The noscript appearance will depend on how many links there are in the menu and where the menu is on the page).