: Is it possible for a script tag to be perceived as an inbound link for SEO? My company has <script> tags on a lot of sites, some of these sites have very high page ranks. Right now

@Phylliss660

I would say any tags ie (rel="tag") would be crawled, but its a matter of on page content that has the most worth and a number of confidential details only known to Google.

Like the other poster stated src is only loading external content so not impacting SEO negatively.

The bottom line is: Have good content, keep visitors on the page long enough, and your rank will increase.

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@Megan663

Googlebot will scan JavaScript files for things that may be links and it will crawl those links. I often see Googlebot getting 404 errors on my site for snippets from the JavaScript that are somewhat formatted like URLs. Things like


ad/3939999
hello.html
/xyzzy


These errors also appear in Google Webmaster Tools.

However, I have seen no evidence that Google passes link juice, Pagerank, or site authority across links that it discovers in JavaScript.


Since it uses heuristics to pick out things that look like links, many of the things that it finds are not actually URLs.
Google would need some indication that the JavaScript makes the link available to the user to click on. Google doesn't pass value across hidden links.


If you want SEO link value from your JavaScript widgets, you should include a plain HTML link with the widget. Google has cracked down on this practice though. They recommend that links placed along with JavaScript snippets have a nofollow because webmasters don't always realize that the link is there or that it is giving value to the site at which it points. Google has even penalized sites for widget linking when the links have rich anchor text. To my knowledge, Google has never penalized sites that use dofollow links if the anchor text of the link is the site domain name or brand name.

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