Will links be counted?

[simonukss]

We are considering a redesign of our website and one of the options we are considering is to come up with something along the lines of http://www.tesco.com/, with rotating top offers.

The question I am wondering is whether or not the links (ie. the blue links on the left side of the main graphic) will be visible to the spiders, and if not, whether there is a way to code it so they are?

[MickEdwards]

Just as menu options I don't see why those links would not be crawled.  What you can have problems with is if those elements expanded to reveal text and then it all depends how those elements are coded.  If there are controlled by javascript there is a possibility Google will not read.

So in that case using your example: googling  cache:http://www.tesco.com or disabling .js in the browser will indicate what can be crawled.

[Chris.Menke]

Simon,

A good way you can usually see for yourself if links are visible to search is check out the text-only cached version of the page in question. To get there, do a site:domain search and from the drop down beneath the title in the result, click on "Cached" and then click on the "text-only version".  On the subsequent page, you can review the text and links that is visible to Google. Hint: use Control F to enable the search function in your browser, type in the anchor text of a link you're looking for  (technology & gaming, for example) and your browser will take you directly to the places where that phrase is found on the page.

[alecfwilson]

They'll be easily visible to a crawler. They'll be extracted based on their HTML/CSS elements, which are additional signals of importance and of website structure. Don't worry about it. If the HTML of the page includes the raw text, a crawler will understand it.