Pin It Button, Too Many Links, & a Javascript question...

[MikeRoberts]

One of the sites I work for has some massive on-page link problems. We've been trying to come up with workarounds to lower the amount of links without making drastic changes to the page design and trying to stay within SEO best practices. We had originally considered the NoFollow route a few months back but that's not viable. We changed around some image and text links so they were wrapped together as one link instead of being two links to the same place. We're currently running tests on some pages to see how else to handle the issue.

What has me stumped now though is that the damned Pinterest Pin Button counts as an external link and we've added it to every image in our galleries. Originally we found that having a single Pin It button on a page was pulling incorrect images and not listing every possible image on the page... so to make sure that a visitor can pin the exact picture they want, we added the button to everything. We've been seeing a huge uptick in Pinterest traffic so we're definitely happy with that and don't want to get rid of the button. But if we have 300 pictures (which are all links) on a page with Pin It buttons (yet more links) we then have 600+ links on the page. Here's an example page: http://www.fauxpanels.com/portfolio-regency.php

When talking with one of my coders, he suggested some form of javascript might be capable of making the button into an event instead of a link and that could be a way to keep the Pin It button while lowering on-page links. I'm honestly not sure how that would work, whether Google would still count it as a link, or whether that is some form of blackhat cloaking technique we should be wary of.

Do any of you have experience with similar issues/tactics that you could help me with here? Thanks.

TL;DR Too many on page links. Coder suggests javascript "alchemy" to turn lead into gold button links into events. Would this lower links? Or is it bad? Form of Cloaking?

[jws8118]

In my opinion I believe the correct implementation is to use the JavaScript event.  I've seen it implemented this way on a few ecommerce sites that I know are doing well.

[TakeshiYoung]

That is definitely a lot of links... but have you noticed a negative SEO impact because of the pin it buttons? Having that many links isn't ideal, but it probably won't affect your site that much.

Alternatively, you can try loading some of the images via AJAX so that they aren't all displayed at once, and only load when the user scrolls down.

[MikeRoberts]

There was no negative impact after the Pin It button was added and effectively doubled the number of on-page links.

As for the Ajax loading idea, that was actually another one of the ideas that my coder had but I wasn't sure of what the effect would be on Googlebot indexing and following images. Though all the newer photos do get added to the top which would be visible if we implemented that.

[MikeRoberts]

No known negatives associated with doing that? If not then we might give it a test run on one of the galleries.

[Highland]

To my knowledge, Google does only "simple" Javascript. For instance

My Link

will be spidered as a link. if you have your click event do something more arcane (like call a function) it won't be. If you want to further obfuscate it from Google, add your click event by using an observer (like JQuery's $().click() function).

Google, to my knowledge, has never spidered AJAX. AJAX may not contain any human readable content.

[MikeRoberts]

Thanks guys! My coder is going to look over all of the best possible ways we could implement this and then we're going to see about doing a little testing on one of our galleries. Thanks again.

[sprynewmedia]

Loading link via JS is fairly standard technique.  (See http://sharethis.com/ or http://www.addthis.com/).  Google will index some JS created content so you may have to delay the link tag creation until a mouseenter event to get the desired effect.

Added bonus: using well written JS code can lighten the code weight of the page allowing it to load faster. Currently, each Pin icon contains a div, a link and an image tag.  If you use prototyping, JS can replicate all this content from the attributes of the primary image tag very quickly.  (I see you load jQuery so this task is very easy to accomplish)

Also, move the rel="words" in the link into the img tag as an alt attribute.  Current the images lack alt tags which isn't the best.  Using keywords in the rel attribute isn't correct.  It is supposed to mark up the relationship to between items and "Stacked Stone Panels" isn't a relationship. You may have been thinking of the title attribute.

Next, you are loading WAY too many resource files (mainly js).  A few items twice.  Try combining them into a few minified files.   There is a lot of work that could be done to speed up the site: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130320_PT_12RV/  over 25 seconds to load.

Think about making a sprite of the images, it would save a ton of requests and downloads. Also, pagination, if done correctly, could save a lot of time.

[sprynewmedia]

This test showed a little light on what is indexed typically: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really