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.

Hi,

I have a series of websites that have been offline for seven years. Do you guys have any tips that might help restore them to their former SERPs glory?

Nothing about the sites themselves has changes since they went offline. Same domains, same content, and only a different server. What has changed is the SERPs landscape. I've noticed competitive terms that these sites used to rank on the first page for with far more results now. I have also noticed some terms result in what seems like a thesaurus similar language results from traditionally more authoritative websites instead of the exact phrase searched for. This concerns me because I could see a less relevant page outranking me just because it is on a .gov domain with similar vocabulary even though the result is not what people searching for the term are most likely searching for.

The sites have also lost numerous backlinks but still have some really good ones.

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.

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.