Would an onclick before href keep zoom from following link?

[Brad]

Hi, I have several links that zoom will list as being on a page but will not follow the link externally just one page.

The only thing I see that could be affecting this is this, right before an href, the onclick...

onclick="this.style.color = '#990000'" href="http://www.linkgrinder.com/"

Could that be keeping zoom from following the href?? Thanks a lot. Brad

[Ray]

No, the onclick attribute should not hinder Zoom's spider from picking up the link.

If the link is to an external site, you need to make sure that the page you are indexing is a start point with the spider option "Index and follow internal and external links" selected (by clicking on "More" on the "Spider mode" tab and "Edit" or "Add" the start point in question).

[Brad]

Not quite sure what you mean. I have "more" selected and used "follow internal and external links" putting this as the starting point.....

http://www.website.com/index.htm

So that it will follow all the internal and external pages (the first page of external), on my whole site.

[Ray]

Can you give us the actual URL to your start point?
And if possible, email us your ZCFG file with your configuration settings. It'd save us a lot of time guessing what you have or have not done.

[Brad]

I'd prefer not to right now thanks I had a forum hassle me once by doing so, but I'll try to be as detailed as possible from now on. Maybe this is what I am doing wrong. Am I supposed to list each page that I want to be followed one page in externally? I thought that if I included my web site starting point and stated I wanted the links followed externally it would do it for my whole site without listing each page.

This is exactly what is in the spider mode for my site.
Start spider from this url: http://www.website.com/index.htm
Base url: http://www.website.com/

This is what I have exactly in the "more area for my site."
It says http://www.website.com/index.htm (index and follow all)
Additional spider url, spider URL:
http://www.website.com/index.htm
Base URL: http://www.website.com/

checkmarked (index page and follow external and internal links) and said OK.

[Ray]

That should be fine, from what we can tell. No, you do not need each page to be a start point. All internal pages within a start point (marked with "index internal and external") will have the same property, and an external page link from them should be indexed.

As I said, we can't guess what the problem is without seeing the website and your configuration. Your links may not be displayed without Javascript for example (the onclick attributes should be correctly ignored by the indexer however) and thus the spider would not pick up the links. Unfortunately, we can't really be of much help without the information we requested.

Those URLs above, you say are "exactly" what you have, but they're clearly not, because your website is unlikely to be "www.website.com". Things vary from site to site, and the problem could be elsewhere, we simply can't guess from the brief description of the problem you provided.

And for the record, I'm not sure what "hassles" you previously had on other forums, but we certainly do not send spam to people who email us.

[Brad]

I know answering questions to many people in a forum who don't give their web sites can be very frustrating, especially to those operating programs, so I completely understand. If I understand your side of this I hope you can try to understand mine. The only defense I have is I made a promise to myself not to give out my email address and my web site address starting this year. I have some health problems and the less stress the better and spam is stressful to me. It turns out the problem isn't people looking up this information, it was me for giving it out. I was very glad you had a forum because then I could just connect to the forum. Surely you can work with us a little bit to troubleshoot, I haven't been asking this same question for long at all. Here is what the links look like.



<a style="color: rgb(0, 0, 80); font-size: 10px;" onmouseover="this.style.color = '#3333FF'" href="http://www.daltile.com/" target="_blank">Dal-tile Corporation
Vault</a><span style="font-size: 10px; font-family: 'times roman', serif;">Try the nice
tile from this company.</span></p>

Zoom doesn't have any problem reading

and <span> html text tags?

I'll do more reading and see if I can figure it out. At least your last message sounds encouraging. This must not be a common problem or you would probably tell me more. My zoom works great except for this one thing, it does follow the external links on the main page only. (index.htm) but not the others unless I list the page in "more."
Let me know if you think of anything else please that I can try, thank you very much.

[Ray]

No, Zoom does not have any problem handling

and <span> or any other HTML tags.

From looking at your code, I can't see any reason why Zoom would not follow that link. In fact, we even tested that exact bit of code and it followed the link fine.

And yes, we have not had any other reported problems with this, and we have tested the scenario several times now with the latest version of the software and have confirmed that it works in our test cases.

Hope you can get to the bottom of this, but as I mentioned before, our help is limited if you can not provide us with the information we need.

[Brad]

I should tell you this. I uninstalled the old copy before and made sure it was gone from everywhere. I downloaded Version 4.2.1013 2 weeks ago and made sure I didn't do anything in the configuration at all. I left it all as is. So there is nothing in the configuration, it is the same as your original.

(I wanted to make sure any changes I made wouldn't ruin any link searches). So I didn't touch a thing.

Then I added my key to the registration again and it said "registration is accepted" and I said OK. And in the "about" area it says it is registered to me. It is the professional addition btw.

Then I made sure I set it to (index and follow all) as I told you above on the http://www.website.com/index.htm entry.

So the new copy does the same thing as the old copy. It will not follow the links on other pages. I am not trying to make you mad when I ask you this, I just want to be sure we are both on the same page on this.

Are you sure it follows links on other pages of our web site, one page up externally on someone elses website? If the link is to another web site and not from our own web site? Without putting each seperate page in "more?"

Because in the "more" under "edit" section it says "index page and follow internal and external links, etc." it doesn't say "index web site and follow all internal and external links".

Thank you very much.

[David]

Are you sure it follows links on other pages of our web site

You didn't provide the information we asked for about your site or your configuration settings. So as much as we would like to help, we can't.

Here is the section of the help file regarding start point settings.

=======
Advanced spider URL options: Clicking on the “More >>” button will bring up a window which allows you to add more spider URLs or specify advanced spider crawling options. This is particularly helpful when indexing across multiple websites or domains. With each spider URL you can specify the following options:

· Index page and follow internal links: index the content of the specified page and follow any internal links (links to pages beginning with the base URL) found.

· Index page and follow internal and external links: index the content of the specified page and follow any internal and external links. However, external links are only followed up to one level. For example, an external page linked from an internal page is scanned, but an external page linked from an external page is not.

· Index single page only: index the content of the specified page and not follow any of the links found on it.

· Follow links only: only follow the links found on this page but will not index any of the page content.

You can also override the automatic base URL determined from this window, if necessary.

The Import and Export buttons allow you to mass-insert a list of start points from a text file. See chapter 6 in the Users Guide for more information.
=======

------
David

[Brad]

Thanks, should it be following links to other web sites on my other pages, without the pages being listed in "more?"

[David]

Depending on your settings which you have refused to tell us.

-----
David

[bradd]

I don't like to bother nice people with my problems and look into things that might be unecessary, if I can fix myself.

I've seen many times people put programmers into hours of work over something real simple, which the programmers don't appreciate. I don't want to be one of those. Thanks

[Ray]

While you may mean well with your intentions, the truth is that you actually use up more of our time by holding back the information we need to provide proper support. There are many possible reasons for your problem, and if we have the information we need, we may have been able to determine the cause of your problem in maybe 5 minutes or so. Instead, we're forced to take stabs in the dark and make wild guesses at what's happening. This takes us much more time in the long run, and we may end up not finding any solution at this rate. It might even be a legitimate bug that we have not come across before, but since we lack the details we need, we do not know this.

Furthermore, if you have purchased our software, you must have already given us an email address for us to send you the license key, and similarly with registering onto this forum. So your reasons for trying to maintain anonymousity does seem somewhat futile. However, it is of course, up to you, and we don't look into our databases and email people who do not want us to contact them. We can only do what we can to help.