4 replies to this topic

[Dan H]

Hi all, firstly would like to say what an excellent forum and thanks in advance for any help I will receive.

I am new to web design and know very little about code so I am using dreamweaver cs3.

I pretty much understand the concept and how to generate my own robots.txt file, however, I am struggling to decide which urls to disallow.

My site has a picture gallery. This involves clicking on a thumbnail that I have set to open up a url in another browser window tailored to my images (without navi & menu bars etc). These url's are linkless and only include images with a brief description. The user then closes the window themselves.

Question is. Would i be right to disallow spiders access to these kind of url's? There are around 40 of them and as they are not really part of the main structure of my site - I can't see the point in spiders visiting them. Would they be kind of dead end as they are linkless?

Once again thanks very much for baring with me

Dan

[Randy]

Welcome Dan !

Chances are you won't even have to worry about excluding those from the spiders. If you're doing something where you're using a Javascript routine dynamically opening a window that is sized for the image itw will be displaying it's entirely possible that the search engines spiders will leave it alone all by themselves. This is because spiders do not parse or process Javascript.

Have a look at source code that is producing those windows. If the href references a Javascript function you won't need to exclude them at all. eg something that looks like:

CODE

<a href="someFunction('imagename');">Anchor Text</a>

If there's no actual page address right after the href the spiders will leave that link alone.

If the href does include a real page address it's probably not hurting you since those pages contain no content other than a picture. However you can exclude them if you want since they're not doing you any good either.

[Dan H]

Hello from the grey uk Randy. Thanks for your quick response.

Let me explain a little more. Here is the code from the thumbnail page:

CODE

<img src="Images/gallery/thumbs/disithumb.jpg" alt="Wyremead Diesel" width="60" height="80" hspace="11" vspace="5" onclick="MM_openBrWindow('diesel.html','Diesel','scrollbars=yes,width=517,height=700')" />

Basically I run the website for a breed of terrier. The thumbnail links to a new window containing a large pic and text naming the dog. It is all done through the behaviors panel in dreamweaver. However, it links to a page I have created not just the image. This way I can add more images and info on the dog to the page at a later date.

From what you are saying it seems like i don't have to bother as the spiders will not follow these kind of links?

[Randy]

Tricky one, but let me ask you this.

Is there any html code right before that img src tag, and if so does it mention the .html page without a javascript reference in there right after it says href?

The code you posted above techncially isn't even a link. It's a javascript onClick event. The search engine spiders won't see that as being a link at all. Because technically it's not.

What will tell you if you're truly safe or not will be if there's an <a href tag just before your img src tag, followed by a closing </a> tag right after it. If you don't see those it's pure javascript, which the search engine spiders don't parse.

[Dan H]

Can't see a <a href tag anywhere. Cool. Thanks very much for your input Randy.