Should I have a 'more' button for links?

[mascotmike]

I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it.

I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear.

However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??

[saibose]

I dont think that you should have a problem if you place the links in a

container, you should not have a problem. You can fight it out with your colleague on this. Its not a banned technique on Google.

[StalkerB]

You mean you have the links hidden using js and clicking 'more' expands the hidden content section to reveal the links?

While search engines can execute some js the list of links is effectively always expanded to the bots.

The only issue would be if the hidden section didn't actually load until the 'more' button was clicked (maybe if you instead used ajax or something) then they'd not be able to see the links.

Only thing to really worry about is if you end up having hundreds of links on the page.

For a reasonable facsimilie of what bots see you can put the page into - http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php - and see what links it can pull out.

[krissy-cca]

I'd say you'd be fine but it depends on how many towns there are which essentially means links. What type of site is it and how many towns are listed?

DD