Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?

[lcourse]

Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and  city landing pages on our index page of the root domain. 
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country. 
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page. 
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later.

In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option.

Any recommendations on how best to implement?

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

So, if you want those links to be crawlable, it means that those links have to be specifically in the code of the website. It can be invisible to the user, but it has to be "visible" to crawlers, meaning you have to see it in source code or something. So, what you can do is have "see more" button, which simply only displays content, which is already loaded. Another way is to have completely separate page not available to users with all the links there and noindex, follow meta robots.

I don't see other ways though. Hope this helps.

[lcourse]

Technically basically there would be 2 options:

1. javascript: hiding DIV
2. ajax (loading it only once user clicks) => here I understand that google can follow ajax links but will do this much more inconsistent since following ajax links requires more of google's ressources.

Ideally I would like to use javascript (hiding DIV), but I am concerned about dilluting "link juice" to my top 100 landing pages. Would this be a relevant concern?

[DmitriiK]

So, even though google supposedly can crawl ajax, there are always troubles with it. Check this article: http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-sites-235267

And here is a thing about diluting. If Google can indeed crawl ajax, it will be the same in terms of dilution, since it would be able to see all the links. Here is another question - are all those links follow?

[lcourse]

Dimitrii thanks a lot. Yes all would be follow links.

I guess my main concern is the "dillution" of link juice. In several places I read that the concept of optimizing site architecture for optimizing for "link juice" would be a concept of the past. But from all my understanding how google values links it makes sense that it could affect rankings of my core landing pages if I have on the index page links to 1000 instead of 100 core landing pages.

Also my doubt is whether adding links in hidden DIV would affect dillution. Here I guess the answer can only be given by somebody who added lots of links in hidden DIV and monitored whether or not it had a noticeable impact on rankings.

[DmitriiK]

It wouldn't matter if links are in the hidden div or not. As long as they are in the code - it will "dilute".

[lcourse]

thanks Dimitrii