Feed The Spiders Good Links – But No Junk Food Please

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

1) Hyperlinks. This may seem almost silly, but you would be amazed at the number of sites I run into when doing consultations and website analyses that have non-standard hyperlinks. By “non-standard”, I’m referring to javascrípt generated hyperlinks or hyperlinks embedded within flash files.

OMG! You can’t be serious!

Actually, you know, I’ve seen it too. It’s sad. Those links won’t be very valued, even at the great Google.

Flash is making a comeback. It’s cool. And now that we’ve all got maximum bandwidth, unlike the old days when we were on dial up, it’s actually usable. Except that the search engines haven’t learned how to crawl it. Yet.

I predict that some search genius will eventually figure out how to make a spider that will crawl and fall in love with Flash. But it hasn’t happened yet. So just bear in mind that in this year of the third millennium, Flash is unreadable. That includes links. So why have links embedded in Flash files?

Secondly, Javascript is a real lifesaver in some situations. I understand. But too much Javascript in your code is a spider killer. Don’t kill the spiders! They’re the best friends you have.

Feeding a spider loads of Javascript is like inviting it to feast on the fly caught in its web then when it gets there injecting it with poison. You might as well just kill your website and be done with. Here’s a simple solution: Wrap up that Javascript into a neat little little folder and place it in a separate file on your server and reference it from your html. But take out the links. Those links won’t do you any good inside the Javascript.

One simple rule when it comes to links: Use the standard a href tag for all of your links. That’s how spiders get fed. It makes them happy. Then they’ll come back for more flies. Er, links. And other good stuff.