Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can Google crawl dynamically generated links?
-
Thanks in advance!
-
A few years ago I added a location finder which then auto generated product content for ERIKS. This generated 1000's of URLs overnight, the problem was Google thought I was spamming it's indexes. Google does follow all links on a web page/sitemap however it's what it does with them that counts. The ERIKS Hose Technology Site http://www.eriks-hose-technology.com relies on this type of coding using Classic ASP.
I have a number of other sites which also rank highly on Google You'll find Revolvo by searching for 'Split Roller Bearings'. So it's also not as bad at ranking as some people may tend to think. I would agree however that English URLs are better than coded. The main issue here is to make sure that your main keyword is in the URI to ensure that Google knows what your page is about.
-
For the most part, Google can crawl any links on the page, but I think I could do with a little bit more information about what pages are being linked to and how the links are being generated.
If you are using javascript or even (shudder!) Flash to generate the links then search engines will struggle to see them.
If it's in html then it should be fine, but you need to be careful of duplicate content. If a single page can be called up by multiple dynamically generated URLs then it can harm search ranking if rel=canonical tags have not been used.
-
Hi,
For the most part, Google can find their way well around dynamic pages with few problems. There are always going to be exceptions, but this tends to be when there are lots of parameters to the URL structure.
As long as it is pretty simple, you shouldn't have any problems.
-Andy
-
Well, it can crawl anything found on a web page. If you are referring to a page whose links are dynamically generated in the sense that you build them before serving the page (php for example), then yes. If Google bot reaches that page in any way (it is not blocked etc) then your links will be crawled as well.
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
-
Crawl Stats Decline After Site Launch (Pages Crawled Per Day, KB Downloaded Per Day)
Hi all, I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design: URLs did not change Mobile URLs were redirected Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3 Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel) I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats. User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 (crawler@brightedge.com) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BandG0 -
Can you index a Google doc?
We have updated and added completely new content to our state pages. Our old state content is sitting in a our Google drive. Can I make these public to get them indexed and provide a link back to our state pages? In theory it sounds like a great link building strategy... TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE1 -
Does content revealed by a 'show more' button get crawled by Google?
I have a div on my website with around 500 words of unique content in, automatically when the page is first visited the div has a fixed height of 100px, showing a couple of hundred words and fading out to white, with a show more button, which when clicked, increases the height to show the full content. My question is, does Google crawl the content in that div when it renders the page? Or disregard it? Its all in the source code. Or worse, do they consider this cloaking or hidden content? It is only there to make the site more useable for customers, so i don't want to get penalised for it. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOhmygod0 -
Using "nofollow" internally can help with crawl budget?
Hello everyone. I was reading this article on semrush.com, published the last year, and I'd like to know your thoughts about it: https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-google-crawl-relnofollow-at-all/ Is that really the case? I thought that Google crawls and "follows" nofollowed tagged links even though doesn't pass any PR to the destination link. If instead Google really doesn't crawl internal links tagged as "nofollow", can that really help with crawl budget?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
Does google credit links from iFrames or created by Javascript, if so, is one more powerful than the other?
Consider this example, because I want to be clear about what I mean. You have two websites. Lets all them www.a.com and www.b.com. On www.a.com/some/page, there is an iframe something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A Former User
<iframe src="www.b.com/some/special/path"></iframe>
Then content of this iframe is a bunch of pictures, text and numbers, as well as a group of links, linking each picture to www.b.com for example the links might be:
www.b.com/content/1
www.b.com/content/2
www.b.com/content/3 Questions: When google crawls **www.a.com/some/page, **does it pass link juice to www.b.com/content/*? Does google instead consider these to be internal links within b.com itself. because links to www.b.com/content/ ** are actually from b.com itself, since the domain of the iframe is actually: www.b.com/some/special/path 3) Is there any amount of link juice passed from www.a.com/some/page to* www.b.com/some/special/path **because this is the src= element of an iframe that a.com is hosting? Consider an alternative setup. Where instead of using an iframe the contents of the above described iFrame is actually added the the page dynamically using javascript, and a call to an API endpoint at b.com. Resulting in these links being added directly to the body of a.com without being wrapped in an iframe element. Questions:
4) Do these links that were created after page load still get crawled and credited by google? (i have heard in the past that google was going to start crawling javascript, i just don't know if this is known for a fact yet).
5) Do links created on the client side hold the same weight as a link that was served directly via the backend html generation? If both the links within the iframe and the links within the javascript embed method pass link juice. Is one preferred over the other? is one known to be more effective than the other? Thanks!0 -
Will Google View Using Google Translate As Duplicate?
If I have a page in English, which exist on 100 other websites, we have a case where my website has duplicate content. What if I use Google Translate to translate the page from English to Japanese, as the only website doing this translation will my page get credit for producing original content? Or, will Google view my page as duplicate content, because Google can tell it is translated from an original English page, which runs on 100+ different websites, since Google Translate is Google's own software?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Can too many NoFollow links damage your Google rankings?
I've been trying to recover from a Google algorithm change since Sep 2012, so far without success. I'm now wondering if the nofollow on external links in my blog posts are actually doing me damage. http://www.smartdatinguk.com/blog/ Does anyone have any experience of this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0