SEO: do crawlers understand <a href=.. links that never will be used?

Question

Hi,

I'm developing a public classified advertisement portal, where users can post their ads (ie selling cars, houses, looking for a job,..) and browse them. I want to make the listings (ie "cars", "recently added", ..) SEO-friendly, so each link to advert detail is in his canonical form, ie:

<ul>
..
<li>
<a href="http://mysite/ad/title-of-the-advertisement-xy"&gt;title of the advertisement</a>
</li>
...
</ul>

but then I lose the search parameters (listings are generated querying a search engine), and I don't want to append a querystring like

?qId=aa31f078-d0f4-45f5-8ad9-d1417f9f08ff

(also because I want to keep it readable for users who want to copy/paste the advertisement detail page url)

What I'm trying to do is to use javascript on page loading to make each link a trigger for a form "post" submission (ie, adding an onclick handler for each link and doing a submit() on a form on the bottom of the page with an hidden field containing the opId)

So, the question is: do Google and other search engine crawlers understand that those link can't directly take you to the advertisement detail page, but there is a javascript elaboration on the middle?

thanks s.

Answer 1

I think, that more complex the solution is, more user and search engine unfriendly becomes the situation. Try to find simpler and more elegant technique.

I know some websites using this "form-technique" to spy the outbound hits and traffic from different links on their pages without loosing the direct link "SEO-power". They return false onclick of the link, submit a form at the same time to preserve the get variables and finally make header() location or 301 redirect to the link url.

I suggest you to store the variable id into a session variable and check for it before the generation of every page.