Will Google Count Links Loaded from JavaScript Files After the Page Loads
-
Hi,
I have a simple question. If I want to put an image with a link to another site like a banner ad on my page, but do not want it counted by Google. Can I simply load the link and banner using jQuery onload from a separate .js file?
The ideal result would be for Google to index a script tag instead of a link.
-
Good Answer. I completely abandoned the banner I was thinking of using. It was from one of those directories that will list your site for free if you show their banner on your site. Their code of course had a link to them with some optimized text. I was looking for a way to display the banner without becoming a link farm for them.
Then I just decided that I did not want that kind of thing on my site even if it is in a javascript onload event if Google is going to crawl it anyway, so I just decided not to add it.
Then I started thinking about user generated links. How could I let people cite a source in a way that the user can click on without exposing my site to hosting spammy links. I originally used an ASP.Net linkbutton with a confirm button extender from the AJAX Control ToolKit that would display the url and ask the user if they wanted to go there. Then they would click the confirm button and be redirected. The problem was that the URL of the page was in the head part of the DOM.
I replaced that with a feature using a modal popup that calls a javascript function when the link button is clicked. That function then makes an ajax call to a webservice that gets the link from the database. Then the javascript writes an iframe to a div in the modal's panel. The result should be the user being able to see the source without leaving the site, but a lot of sites appear to be blocking the frame by using stuff like X-Frame-Options, so I'm probably going to use a different solution that uses the modal without the iframe. I am thinking of maybe using something like curl to grab content from the page to write to the modal panel along with a clickable link. All of this of course after the user clicks the linkbutton so none of that will be in the source code when the page loads.
-
I think what we really need to understand is, what is the purpose of hiding the link from Google? If it's to prevent the discovery of a URL or prevent the indexation of a certain page (or set of pages) - it's easier to achieve the same thing by using Meta no-index directives or wildcard-based robots.txt rules or by simply denying Gooblebot's user-agent, access to certain pages entirely
Is is that important to hide the link, or is it that you want to prevent access to certain URLs from within Google's SERPs? Another option is obviously to block users / sessions referred from Google (specifically) from accessing the pages. There's lots can be done, but a bit of context would be cool
By the way, no-follow does not prevent Google from following links. It actually just stops PageRank from passing across. I know, it was named wrong
-
What about a form action? Where instead of an a element with a href attribute you add a form element with an action attribute to what the href would be in a link.
-
Thanks for that answer. You obviously know a lot about this issue. I guess they would be able to tell if the .js script file creates an a element with a specific href attribute and then add that element to a specific div tag after the page loads.
It sounds like it might be easier just to nofollow those links instead of going to all the trouble to redirect the .js file whenever Google Bot crawls the page. I fear that could be considered cloaking.
Another possibility would be a an alert that requires a user interaction before grabbing a url from a database. The user would click on the link without an href, the javascript onclick fires, the javascript grabs the the url from a database, the user is asked to click a button if they want to proceed, and then the user is redirected to the external url. That should keep the external URL out of the script code.
-
Google can crawl JavaScript and its contents, but most of the time they are unlikely to do so. In order to do this, Google has to do more than just a basic source code scrape. Like everyone else seeking to scrape data from inside of generated elements, Google has to actually check the modified source-code, after all of the scripts have run (the render) rather than the base (non-modified) source code before any scripts fire
Google's mission is to index the web. There's no doubt that, non-rendered crawls (which do not contain the generated HTML output of scripts) can be done in a fraction of the time it takes to get a rendered snapshot of the page-code. On average I have found rendered crawling to take 7x to 10x longer than basic source scraping
What we have found is that Google are indeed, capable of crawling generated text and links and stuff... but they won't do this all the time, or for everyone. Those resources are more precious to Google and they crawl more sparingly in that manner
If you deployed the link in the manner which you have described, my anticipation is that Google would not notice or evaluate the link for a month or two (if you're not super popular). Eventually, they would determine the presence of the link - at which point it would be factored and / or evaluated
I suppose you could embed the script as a link to a '.js' module, and then use Robots.txt to ban Google from crawling that particular JavaScript file. If they chose to obey that directive, the link would pretty much remain hidden from them. But remember, it's only a directive!
If you wanted to be super harsh you could block Googlebot (user agent) from that JS file and do something like, 301 them to the homepage when they tried to access it (instead of allowing them to open and read the JS file). That would be pretty hardcore but would stand a higher chance of actually working
Think about this kind of stuff though. It would be pretty irregular to go to such extremes and I'm not certain what the consequences of such action(s) would be
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does the follow link from the moz Profile really count after first with nofollow?
Hey all, I discovered that the link from the public profile might not count. To my knowledge Google "counts" the first link to another page on any given page. The public profile has a nofollow link before your follow link:
On-Page Optimization | | Sebes
linktodomain.tld linktodomain.tld Doesn't this invalidates all the public profile links? What is your stance on this? Regards Sebastian2 -
In counting words for a "long article," do comments count in the word count?
As Moz and others have proven, long articles help ranking, linking and sharing. My question is, do the comments at the end of an article count in the word count as Google counts it.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
PANDA Attack: Too many on page links
Hey guys! I have a bit of a dilemma...one of my sites got hit by Panda 😞 The content itself contains about 10 links, however since the site is a process directory, at the bottom of the page you will find that the visitor can also browse process directory by name or page and then beneath this there are 80 links :s My concern is that if i remove this I will lose internal link juice! HELP! What approach should I take? I was thinking of either reducing the number of links OR hiding it by using Java ORRRR removing the links entirely. Advice anyone? This is a page as an example: http://www.processlibrary.com/directory/files/csrsc/25349/ All pages are like this!
On-Page Optimization | | OrangeGuys0 -
Several Links in Some Pages
Dear all, Our main site is a bussiness directory, and following some SEO advices, we are creating landing pages for each category, in order to optimize them for the keywords. Those landing pages have links to the listings related to them. Using the same idea, we have created pages related to the regions, and those pages include links to the listings located in them. The only problem that I see with that, is the number of links that some categories or regions could have. Is there a limit of recomended number of links per page, from a SEO perspective? We also have a main category page, that includes a list of all categories, and this page could also have a relatively high number of links. The pages have around 300 to 500 words, some include also images, some include videos. Many thanks for your help, Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | te_c0 -
Right way to block google robots from ppc landing pages
What is the right way to completely block seo robots from my adword landing pages? Robots.txt does not work really good for that, as far I know. Adding metatags noindex nofollow on the other side will block adwords robot as well. right? Thank you very much, Serge
On-Page Optimization | | Kotkov0 -
I am optimizing my webpages according to suggestions from the On Page Report Card. Should I have more than one keyword for a page?
I am optimizing my webpages according to suggestions from the On Page Report Card. Should I have more than one keyword for a page or should I make separate pages for each keyword even when they are similar? Will Google penalize me for making similar pages? Imagine selling, bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters. Keywords examples could be: Bargain chocolate Bargain milk chocolate Bargain milk chocolate peanut clusters Bargain chocolate peanut clusters Chocolate peanut cluster bargains Milk chocolate peanut cluster bargains Etc. Will one page called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com be OK or should I have one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolate.com and one called http://mycompany/bargainmilkchocolatepeanutclusters.com and one called http://mycompany/chocolatepeanutclusterbargains.com , etc.? Thanks for your advice.
On-Page Optimization | | KSHAYY0 -
To many links on a single page Error
I've seen it a few times where you should have less then 100 links per page to help crawling unless your a massively authoritative website. But what happens when your a large ecommerce website with categories and sub categories, you could have a category called 'computers' with a drop down list containing lots of sub cat links. Whats the solution to this? Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper1 -
Too many On-Page Links on a WP based Website
Hi, I've already browsed through various of the Q&As on the "too many On-Page links" issue, but I would really need some advice concerning a WP Site with a dropdown navigation. As outlined in the on-page report, every site has about 180 outgoing links, which pretty much is the number of site featured in the navigation. Even though the 100 link limit is somewhat outdated I'm still worried about the distribution of linkjuice from the starting page and how Google perceives the importance of the various pages. Would it make sense to adapt the structure of the navigation, so that the starting page only links to the 5 category pages and the category pages only link to the detail pages they contain? The site has good rankings for several pages and I assume that Google can tell that the large number of links is caused by the navigation. But with every page having appr. 180 links it may be difficult for Google to tell, which of those pages are the most important regarding internal link structure... Looking foward to your opinion and insights! Cheers, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | adwordize0