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When is a link not a link? Google Indexing Javascript Links

So when is a link not a link? Answer is when it is a scripted link. Well at least, that used to be the true. Google had issues understanding links that were embedded in script. Many sites often hid links out using script. Often they would do that because they wanted to get reciprocal links out having to give a link out. By linking with script it would appear that the link was reciprocated but the site would not pass link power or page rank (PR). Another reason was some commercial sites used script to track click-thrus on link ads.  Now Google is now able index links within scripts. According to Google's representative Matt Cutts Google has gotten better at crawling javascript, and that URLs you put into javascript that you didn't think would be crawled, might now possibly be crawled and indexed. So those old ad networks are now being indexed without much difficulty.

So how do you stop Google from indexing your links?

One simple method is to use the robots.txt file to tell them which links not to index. Another method is to use Google's ="nofollow” tag to stop the crawler from following the links. Cutts mentioned that even on the onclick in javascript, the crawl and indexing team had submitted code so that it would respect a rel="nofollow". So you can put a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link that is running in javascript, and Google will make sure it doesn't flow pagerank even if they are executing the javascript. So remember this the next time you consider advertising on a site because you may get traffic and a link boost. And if you trying to hide links make sure you use more than just javascript to do it.

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Are you experiencing Google indexing issues. Please feel free to contact me at 905-417-9470 or by email at allanp73@gmail.com