Javascript Tabs and SEO

Does SEO have an issue with Javascript Tabs? i.e. using Ajax and JQuuery Tabs to open pages, does the information on those pages get searched well? Does anybody have some good experience with this?

Thank you.

Right from the horse’s mouth :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769#2

Load your urls in here and see:
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

Thank you Wowzow,

I will look at this.

Any actual experience with this? Thanks

I would say that ajax loaded content will not get searched. Tabs that are built on markup will get searched. Lynx is a great way to check.

I would say that ajax loaded content will not get searched

having a sitemap would help though

Quote from: tmcleroy at May 03, 2010, 03:43 PM

Thank you Wowzow,

I will look at this.

Any actual experience with this? Thanks

No prob, youre welcome.

My experience is: Google means it.

4 years ago, I experimented with putting one of my main menu links on a brand new site in javascript (the rest were regular html links). The js link was never crawled by google in over 2+ years (it was only a ’contact’ form/page, so no biggie). The regular menu links however, were crawled 4-5 times a week by google during those 2 years. I switched the js link back to regular html link (<a>) and it was crawled by googlebot two days later. And then listed in their search index 10 days later.

Knowing that, I always use css menus, and never javascript ones.

...try it yourself on a link you don’t care about being crawled or getting pagerank/seo for.

Thank you Wowzow and Sharkbait, Dev-cw!

This really helps. I was looking at a menu much like Sonic Foundry’s http://www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite/ page on the right. But your comments have helped me to adjust my opinions here.

Like Sharkbait says, you would have to come back with a sitemap to get that search. And maybe javascript links for those things you do not want spammers to see?

Quote from: tmcleroy at May 03, 2010, 07:54 PM

This really helps. I was looking at a menu much like Sonic Foundry’s http://www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite/ page on the right. But your comments have helped me to adjust my opinions here.

Certainly someone has written accordian style css menus by now in almost pure css (except for dynamically toggling "hide" to "display" on the css sheet, via javascript, of course)

If youre actually serious about seo, these are the way to go:
http://www.google.com/#q=css+menus
http://www.google.com/#q=css+accordion+menu
http://www.google.com/#q=pure+css+accordion+menu

Thank you Wowzow. I am looking into this. There is alot there and I am looking through to see if I can find one that fits the bill.

Hi There,
Accordian menu’s with Javascript are ok, as long as the content is not in the JavaScript file but is present in the page. I have developed a number of these menu styles and they have no problem being crawled by Google.

It’s also worth noting that up till last year Google didn’t crawl Javascript at all, however it has started to and will look for links within JavaScript. These links never have as much weight as a regular link but it does find them.

With the sonicfoundry website the links are in the HTML rather than within JavaScript and Google would (or is) able to crawl this menu (although it could be done a lot neater using CSS classes and JavaScript / Mootools.)