Would using javascript onclick functions to override href target be ok?

[isntworkdull]

Hi all,

I am currently working on a new search facility for me ecommerce site... it has very quickly dawned on me that this new facility is far better than my standard product pages - from a user point of view - i.e lots of product attributes for customers to find what they need faster, ability to compare products etc... All in all just better. BUT NO SEO VALUE!!!

i want to use this search facility instead of my category/product pages... however as they are search pages i have "robots noindex them" and dont think its wise to change that...

I have spoken to the developers of this software and they suggested i could use some javascript in the navigation to change the onlclick function to take the user to the search equivelant of the page...

They said this way my normal pages are the ones that are still indexed by google etc, but the user has the benefit of using the improved search pages...

This sounds perfect, however it also sounds a little deceptive... and i know google has loads of rules about these kinds of things, the last thing i want is to get any kind of penalty or any negative reaction from an SEO point of view... I am only considering this as it will improve the user experience on my website...

Can  any one advise if this is OK, or a "no no"...

P.s for those wondering i use an "off the shelf" cart system and it would cost me an arm and a leg to have these features built into my actual category  / product pages.

[AlanMosley]

Google can follow JavaScript links, unless you are very good at hiding them.

I would not worry too much about the duplicate content, don't expect the duplicates to rank, but your not likely to be penalized for them. you can use a canonical tag to point all search results back to the one page.

I would not no index any pages, any links pointed to a no-index page are pouring their link juice away. if you want to no index a page use the meta tag no-index,follow, this way the search engine will follow the links and flow back out to your site

read about page rank and how link juice flows

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/a-simple-explanation-of-pagerank

[isntworkdull]

Hi Alan,

i think i may have explained incorrectly - my search page does have the meta tag noindex,follow - it also has a canonical link back to the main search page (i.e search.html) so i do not think any of the search results will be indexed. So my concern is not duplicate content, this should not happen...

My concern is the fact i am using javascript to litterally divert customers from one page to another... its almost like the static pages are there only for the benefit of google... and thats concerning me...

[AlanMosley]

Well then, yes I would be concerned, you are serving up different content to users, that is cloaking.

[isntworkdull]

even thou the content is identical?

It is only the way that content can then be navigated that is different...

[AlanMosley]

Are they identical, you say the search equivalent, I just wouldn't treat search engines any different

[isntworkdull]

ok, i am not keen on this approach, the developers have offered an alternative... but again, i'm not sure about it, they have said they can use ajax to force their search results / navigation over my current navigation / products on my category / product pages...

this gets rid of having to use javascript to send to different url... but up above Alan mentions cloaking, which to my understanding is basically serving anything different for a search engine / person... and thats what this will do... it serves up a different navigation to people... and the products could be listed in a different order etc... search engines do not see the ajax...

Is this any better? or just as negative?

[Highland]

1. Google understands simple JS that is inline with your HTML. So Google understands that
is a link to domain.com. You can obfuscate this further and Google might not understand it. I've not seen Google try to parse or execute JS but that doesn't mean they can't or won't in the future.

2. I don't think Alan is right in that this is cloaking. Google doesn't understand the same thing users do. It's been an acceptable practice, for instance, to take content found in Flash and copy it to where Google can spider it. The spider pages are for Google but there's no way it would be indexed otherwise and the users can get the same exact content from the frontend experience. Cloaking is where you show two distinctly different pages with the intent of tricking the bots. As long as what Google is indexing is what end users will see, there's no problem.

3. Google is very unlikely to spider AJAX. Many AJAX pages don't return any user readable content (most of mine return things like JSON, which is not for end user consumption) and , as such, are beyond the scope of indexation. Again, as in #2, you might want this content to be shown elsewhere if you want it indexed. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/

[Everett]

Hello James,

Why do these pages have "no SEO value"? Is it because they are AJAX pages or because you have them noindexed? Or both?

To answer your original question, using an on-click javascript event to send a user to a page other than the URL listed in the href tag is borderline. It goes beyond the risk level I would feel comfortable with on an eCommerce site, but a lot of affiliate sites do this. For instance, all of their links out to merchant sites may go through a directory called /outlink/ so the href tag might look like .../outlink/link1234 and appear to send the user to another page on their domain, when actually the user gets redirected to the merchant's (e.g. Amazon.com, Best Buy...) website. Sometimes the user is redirected from the /outlink/... URL and sometimes they never even get that far because the javascript sends them to the merchant's URL first.

It is not cloaking unless you are specifically treating Google differently. If Google doesn't understand your site that is their problem. If you have code that essentially says "IF Google, THEN do this. ELSE do that" it is your problem because you are cloaking. Make sense? There is a very distinct line there.

The bottom line is if you want to show users a certain page then you should be showing that page to Google as well. If the problem is the content on that page doesn't appear for Google (e.g. AJAX) then you should look into optimizing that type of content to the best of your ability. For example, look into the use of hashbangs (#!) as in:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started