making popups spider-friendly

[griffith]

I need some rather technical spidering advice, and I'm hoping that this
is a good place to find it (and my apologies if this isn't). My site
contains pages of images, where each image includes a map that
generates a popup. You can see an example here:

http://album.dweeb.org/pages/1980_1.html

Click on a stamp, and javascript invokes a popup. All of that works
just fine. Here's what doesn't work well. Stamps have an official
Scott catalog number, and collectors who Google for specific stamps
will do so by catalog number. I've included ALT and TITLE tags with
the relevant information for each popup, and the META information for
the page also includes all of the cat #'s for the stamps on the page,
but Google apparently ignores all of that. I'd like to find a way to
add something to each page so that the page isn't changed visually, but
Google and other engines will point to the page whenever someone
searches for the catalog number of a stamp on that page. So in the
sample page above, someone typing in "1804 Benjamin Banneker" should
find that page. Right now, Googling "site:album.dweeb.org 1804"
doesn't return the above page at all, and it should, because it's the
most relevant answer for my site. In fact, Google Images doesn't find
my popups at all, because Google can't spider through the javascript to
find the image files.

So, is there a way to do this? I don't mind ditching javascript if
there is an equivalent non-javascript way of generating minimal popups,
particularly if it's a more spider-friendly way. Any constructive
advice would be welcome.

Jim

[Tim]

On 12 May 2005 18:43:33 -0700,
gr******@dweeb.org posted:

I need some rather technical spidering advice, and I'm hoping that this
is a good place to find it (and my apologies if this isn't). My site
contains pages of images, where each image includes a map that
generates a popup. You can see an example here:

http://album.dweeb.org/pages/1980_1.html

Click on a stamp, and javascript invokes a popup. All of that works
just fine. Here's what doesn't work well. Stamps have an official
Scott catalog number, and collectors who Google for specific stamps
will do so by catalog number. I've included ALT and TITLE tags with
the relevant information for each popup, and the META information for
the page also includes all of the cat #'s for the stamps on the page,
but Google apparently ignores all of that.
Many do. Many care about the following, more than anything else, with
varying degrees of importance:

The page <title> element contents.
Heading element contents.
The contents inside <a> elements </a> leading to a resource.
The page contents in general.

See: <http://www.google.com/webmasters/>

If you cannot work out a nice way to include all of the information that
you need on the page with the content (e.g. page titles and headings next
to the relevant content) for artistic reasons, then the next best approach
might be an index page with the information that points to it. Which also
helps people, as well as robots. That index page will be databased, and
relevant searches will use the links your index page points to, rather than
the index page itself.
Right now, Googling "site:album.dweeb.org 1804"
doesn't return the above page at all, and it should, because it's the
most relevant answer for my site. In fact, Google Images doesn't find
my popups at all, because Google can't spider through the javascript to
find the image files.
Two problems with that:

Firstly few search engines, if any, parse JavaScript, and few probably ever
will.

Secondly, indexing numbers doesn't seem too brilliant with some search
engines.
So, is there a way to do this? I don't mind ditching javascript if
there is an equivalent non-javascript way of generating minimal popups,
particularly if it's a more spider-friendly way. Any constructive
advice would be welcome.

There's more user-friendly ways of doing things, than JavaScript pop-ups
(it's not just search-engine unfriendly). There's a plethora of sites
explaining what a problem JavaScript can be to all and sundry.

--
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temporary). But please reply to the group, like you're supposed to.

This message was sent without a virus, please delete some files yourself.

[Philip Ronan]

gr******@dweeb.org wrote:

http://album.dweeb.org/pages/1980_1.html

Click on a stamp, and javascript invokes a popup. All of that works
just fine. Here's what doesn't work well. Stamps have an official
Scott catalog number, and collectors who Google for specific stamps
will do so by catalog number. I've included ALT and TITLE tags with
the relevant information for each popup, and the META information for
the page also includes all of the cat #'s for the stamps on the page,
but Google apparently ignores all of that.

OK, this is what you have to do:

Replace href="javascript:void(0)" with the location of the image you're
linking to (e.g., href="../images//Singles/1803.jpg")

Replace the alt text with something meaningful (e.g., change alt="1803.jpg"
into alt="U.S. #1803: Performing Arts - W.C. Fields"). This tells Google
what the image is about.

Change your onclick event handler so that it returns a value of false. And
get rid of the "javascript:" bit at the beginning. It doesn't belong there.
For example, change onclick="javascript:popImage('x.jpg', 'blah',161,244)"
into onclick="popImage('x.jpg', 'blah',161,244); return false;" (Note: when
you return a value of false, the onclick event is cancelled. That stops the
browser following the href="" link).

Add <META http-equiv="Content-Script-Type" content="text/javascript"> to the
HEAD section of your HTML pages.

You should be able to do all of this with a few search-and-replace
operations in a text editor.

I hope this helps.

Phil

--
phil [dot] ronan @ virgin [dot] net
http://vzone.virgin.net/phil.ronan/

[griffith]

>OK, this is what you have to do:

[steps deleted]

You should be able to do all of this with a few search-and-replace
operations in a text editor.

Phil, I created a test page, did what you suggested, verified that it
functions as desired, and verified (W3C) that it still validates as
clean XHTML 1.1. So assuming Google and others eventually do the
right thing, your solution does everything that I want without
creating any new problems. Thanks much - you truly are a god among
men. BTW, the entire site is built from scratch from a perl script
and a massive config file, so updating all 650+ pages just meant
tweaking the perl and re-running the script, so at least *that* part
was easy.

Jim