How much javascript does Googlebot read

[CruiseControl]

We have a site where we have certain navigational links solely for the human user. These links help the user experience and lead to pages that we don't need crawled by googlebot. We have these links in javascript so if you disable javascript these links are invisible. Will these links be considered cloaking even though our intention is not to cloak but save our Google crawl for pages we do want indexed?

[portalseo]

Hi CruiseControl, If you want to see how Google views your website you can download a tool called Lynx, Lynx is a text based browser which is very very similar to how Google's crawler views your website.

[CruiseControl]

Thank you all for your input.

[RyanKent]

I wrote up a nice reply then decided to investigate a point and found a nice interview with Matt Cutts from 2010. The relevant quotes are:

Matt Cutts: For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript. I wouldn't say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don't execute JavaScript.

Eric Enge: If someone did choose to do that (JavaScript encoded links or use an iFrame), would that be viewed as a spammy activity or just potentially a waste of their time?

Matt Cutts: I am not sure that it would be viewed as a spammy activity, but the original changes to NoFollow to make PageRank Sculpting less effective are at least partly motivated because the search quality people involved wanted to see the same or similar linkage for users as for search engines. In general, I think you want your users to be going where the search engines go, and that you want the search engines to be going where the users go.

Article link: http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml

[SeoStallion]

There are circumstances where you are allowed to use 'cloaking' as some very influential websites have done however in your particular situation a nofollow tag and noindex tag would be the 'normal' procedure.

Personally, I think it is a grey area. You are not using the javascript to hide content as such and provided you are clearly not trying to manipulate the system there should be no reason why you would be penalised for it.

[blackballonline]

I would say yes they are cloaked links. I would suggest using HTML links only for maximum juice and to not anger the Googlebot. Serving different content to the user with and without javascript is a no-no. As for your crawl budget - best practice is to use a nofollow tag on the link and a noindex on the target page if you don't want it in the SERPS.