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I have setup some dropdown menus allowing users to find pages on my website by selecting options across multiple dropdowns:
eg. Color of Car, Year
This would generate a link like: mysite.xyz/blue/2010/
The only problem is, because this link is dynamically assembled with Javascript, I've also had to assemble each possible combination from the dropdowns into a list like:
<noscript>
No javascript enabled? Here are all the links:
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2009/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2010/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2010/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2009/'>mysite.xyz/red/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2010/'>mysite.xyz/red/2010/</a>
</noscript>
My question is, if I put these in a tag like this, will I be penalized or anything by search engines such as Google? I've already been doing so for some navigational stuff which required offsets etc. However, now I would be listing a whole list of links here too. I want to provide them here, moreso so that google can actually index my pages - but for those without javascript, they can still navigate too.
Your thoughts? Also.. even though I have some links that appear to have been indexed, I AM NOT 100% SURE, which is why I'm asking :P
217
As stated by Maile Ohye, a former Google support engineer, Google analyzes the content of noscript tags. However, they should accurately reflect the content of JS scripts, otherwise, the bot may perceive them as cloaking.
As Googlebot can crawl and render JavaScript content, there is no reason (such as preserving crawl budget) to block it from accessing any internal or external resources needed for rendering. Doing so would only prevent your content from being indexed correctly, and thus, poor SEO performance.
To test the noscript tags, you can use an HTML validator to ensure you've placed the <noscript> tags in valid / legal places in your HTML. Other than that, just view your pages with JavaScript disabled to see the effect. Thanks - so the iframe stuff should be taken out of the noscript tag, correct?
JavaScript SEO is a part of Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that seeks to make JavaScript-heavy websites easy to crawl and index, as well as search-friendly. The goal is to have these websites be found and rank higher in search engines.
If the noscript code represents an alternative to the javascript code, then it should be fine I think, but Google does try to spot fishy seo and may penalize, so it's better to avoid doing this when possible.
In your case, consider spending some time making a drop down menu such that you can have the links on the page in a list item and use javascript + css to simulate a drop down menu, this way you will not need to use the noscript tag.
182
A decade ago, I made my website using image links for internal navigation (this at a time when CSS was brand-new and HTML4 Transitional was normal). I then added text navigation links at the bottom of the page.
I believe this (and your idea) is a common enough technique that, as long as you really aren't trying to do something sketchy, Google et al should interpret correctly.
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