4 replies to this topic

[CARLOJPF]

Hello,

I recently had a problem I had to add an <li> to my spry navigation bar which I made using dreamweaver. My entire site was created and is managed through Dreamweaver. I found a solution to use find and replace for entire local directory in yahoo answers which saved me a lot of time from manually updating dozens of pages.

My Question is would it hurt my SEO if I use PHP or JS for my main navigation bar. I also found suggestions in yahoo answers saying if I used PHP or JS I would save a lot of time.

Sincerely,
Carlo

[Jill]

My Question is would it hurt my SEO if I use PHP or JS for my main navigation bar.

PHP is fine. Not sure what you mean by JS.

[piskie]

JS (javascript) navigation is not SE friendly IMO.

[Mikl]

If you're using Javascript for navigation, you really should also provide an alternative way of letting visitors navigate, for the benefit of those folk who cannot or will not have Javascript enabled. Once you've done that, the search engines will also be able to follow the links, so you'll have no SEO problems.

[Michael Martinez]

Google tries to follow Javascript links but I'm not sure if Bing can/does. Yahoo! used to index every Javascript link it could get to (which is why Yahoo! Site Explorer backlink reports were often inflated -- they picked up all the PPC links running in AdSense and other Javascript widgets).

Generally speaking it's better NOT to use Javascript for navigation but it's not necessarily the kiss of death. It's definitely NOT the kiss of optimization.