Google does not crawl links hidden in Javascript Onclick Events.
A few months back I wrote about detecting duplicate content using Google. When I wrote the post I inadvertantly set up an experiment with code that looks like this:
Which, creates a working link that looks like this:
In the past there’s been some discussion over whether Google is executing Javascript. I can’t answer that question; I’ve seen search engines like Searchme’s crawler Charlotte executing Java all over the place – with hilarious consequences on the analytics data but I genuinely can’t comment on what Googlebot will (and will not) execute Java wise.
What I do know is, that after two months, the url in the Javascript onclick event above has still not been indexed by Google. Nor has Yahoo, nor has Live.
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Thanks for your insight @richardbaxterseo, what is the date of this post? I am still researching the changes that Google is doing as far as JavaScript linking goes.
This was published about 8 months ago. To that end I strongly recommend you test the onclick. There’s a canonical tag on this site now which invalidates the test somewhat! I may remove the tag and see what happens at some point soon. Thanks for dropping by!
Thanks for your quick response. Found this after I posted my comment yesterday, http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/SearchFriendlyDevelopment.html (around minute 19:00) – It seems GoogleBot does officially follow JavaScript links. Good for some, not so good for others.
I submitted this site recently and google seems to crawl is every 10 minutes, but it keeps crawling the same links over and over again even though there were other links to crawl http://openbible.no-ip.org/openbible/bible-feed
very weird.
Now I have a real domain name http://newonlinebible.com and Google crawls it about ever 10 seconds. And many crawls are repeats.