Links and Spiders: The No-Go List

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 21 of July , 2008 at 12:57 pm

Now that we have ascertained that Links are an important part of your overall Local SEO strategy as it relates to actual people, lets look at how Links affect your site from the perspectives of search engines.

Links provide navigation for people visiting sites, but also for ’spiders.’ (We also use bots, crawlers and other cool creepy-crawly type names for them, but you get the idea.) Basically, a spider is a program that goes out to websites and gathers up information, then gives that data back to a search engine to index your site for their search results.

Your site is mapped, and the Spider is the map-reader. The important thing to remember is that you never, ever, ever want the map-reader to get lost!

When the spiders index your site, they use your links to get to other pages, one by one. Because we want to the spider to get to and from the sites effectively to index your site, you need to use links that are good for not only human visitors, but spiders, too.

So, what links can a spider not follow? Here are some of the basic ones:

Drop Down Menu Links: Spiders are unsophisticated and have a seriously hard time with drop-down menus.

Flash Links: Flash it dynamic and cool, but Spiders just aren’t there yet.

No Follow Links: Um, it means no-follow. Spiders won’t follow.

JavaScript Links: Javascript is wonderful, but it essentially invisible to spiders. Spiders won’t be able to index your site and your links will be worthless. (Most drop-down menus use a Javascript function.)

                      Category: Local Search Engine Optimization                      

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