Milonic search engine friendly?

[theking@mysecretbase.com]

I'm curious...

I use the menu in such a way that the menu arrays are actually kept right in the current html page (actually a single global ColdFusion template), rather than being broken out to a separate js file.

Is this good enough for search engine crawlers? Will they follow embedded links within the source code, or do I need some sort of html backup? I've got something like that now, mostly for use by the dhtml-impaired, but I'd prefer to drop it.

--Matt--

[randy@extremevoltage.com]

Andy, any idea on this? I have no idea if this situation is spider friendly or not, I'm not familiar with cold fusion.

[mikey@mcrco.com]

Actually, this has nothing to do with CF, but rather with how search engine spiders crawl pages.

One thing I've heard elsewhere -- and which makes perfect sense -- is that if you include your link info in a separate file then you can kiss goodbye a full-site crawl and thus deep-linking in a search engine, since the spiders will not follow and read a .js assignment to see if any links are inside.

HOWEVER, anyone using a server-side application environment can include the menu arrays directly into the html source via whatever tools are in use. I use CF, but you could just as easily do this with PHP or ASP, I'm sure.

So it all boils down to: does anyone know anything about whether or not javascript links in the directly-accessible html source are looked at or ignored by your typical web crawlers.

--Matt--

[jake_viii@yahoo.com]

ah, ok. could the question be posed to one of the engines themselves? Off hand I would guess the answer is no because it's not in the <a href format which is probably what the spider looks for. Without that actual html tag they will probably ignore what looks like straight text. Some javascript might be spider fiendly if using normal conventions, but our menu is different. Since the menu is programed to read a certain array format things are not in any standard convention really, and I know the spider won't read the mmenu.js to figure out the format
Sorry
Yadin

[mike@eagleriver.com]

Matt....

Try this as an option to ensure your site will get spidered without having the .js embedded. Just before </body> in your index page, list your links as per standard HTML <a href="http://www.whatever.com/xyz.html"></a> etc. etc.

I think this would be a work around solution.

Pat

[thirdoffthematch@yahoo.co]

Yadin,

Thanks, I figured as much, but basically hoped maybe things had changed and someone knew a bit about it. If I get energetic enough I can post something on a search engine discussion forum where the subject is a little closer to the fore.

Pat,

I already place a link pointing to an HTML-only version of a site. This covers the bases for DHTML-unfriendly browsers and provides a crawlable system. Its a bit of extra work I'd like to avoid if I could (hence my post), but I may be stuck with it. Fortunately the system maintains itself; its only a setup issue.

Cheers,

--Matt--

[echobeatz666@aol.com]

Hi All,

This is actually on my list of concerns and something that I have no idea about how to solve.

All I can suggest is that you have separate pages for search engines but you've already figured that one.

There may be a way of including JS in SE's indexing but I'm not that SE savy so if you find out from the forum that would be cool.

Cheers
Andy