While I was at WebmasterWorld, I had a webmaster come up to me and ask me about the NOSCRIPT tag. Where this tag gets used is for those sites that have Javascript menus, and that don’t provide an alternate text-based navigation scheme. These sites end up cutting off search engines from portions of those sites. In addition, users who have browsers that do not support Javascript also can’t use the site effectively either.
One possible solution is to use a NOSCRIPT tag. Using this tag, you can include the navigation links in text form, making them accessible to those users (and crawlers) not able to read Javascript.
But unfortunately, like so many great potential ideas, there are serious problems with this approach. It originates with the fact that this has been used to be spammers as a way of stuffing unrelated links and content on a page. The fact that the NOSCRIPT content is not seen by most users would make it a way to hide content.
The result is that the search engines cannot really trust the content found within a NOSCRIPT tag. Here is a forum thread at WebmasterWorld where Brett Tabke says that NOSCRIPT content links do not pass Page Rank. He also indicates that any content within the NOSCRIPT tags may not even be indexed.
Bottom line: It’s a great idea, but it doesn’t fly. Make sure you have text navigation that reaches every point on your site. If you must use a Javascript menu, then make sure you also have a text navigation path as well.
