Are xlinks in SVGs crawlable?

[AaronPC]

We are in the process of using SVG to create an interactive map that will help site visitors browse product listings by region. (I work for a real estate company)

For example, if a visitor were to click on the Florida portion of this US map, they would be taken to our Florida product page via a link setup that looks like:

<a  xlink:href="/luxury-homes/Florida">... </a>

Can anyone help me get a better understanding of how these xlinks are handled for SEO purposes? Are they indexed like regular links by search engines? do they pass link juice?

Thanks,

[_nitman]

Well, not sure about how exactly you'll be putting these links on your product and how well bots will be able to crawl them. AFAIK, bots are smart enough to understand JS these days but upto some extent.

Anyways, if you're planning to build such awesome tool (as you're trying to explain), you should definitely go for it for the better UX. I hope you'll be having nice and useful content on your listing pages anyways (in well crawlable format). So, the problem is about inter-linking/exposing them to bots, right? XML sitemap, HTML sitemap, dynamic footer etc. can help you with that

[AaronPC]

Yep, we'll be updating sitemaps accordingly to hopefully help bots figure this thing out.

I guess the core of my question is how link juice/page rank is handled for these types of links. Part of the reason we are trying to build this is to move these links out of the footer and into the page body, so I want to make sure that these links are crawlable (which it sounds like they are) and that they'll still be passing the same value on to the various regional pages the map links to.