Google indexes based on links. I was at a web site that did not allow the entry of html links so all URLs were entered as raw addresses. I was wondering if Google and other search engines were smart enough to follow these near-links to a web page. I made a couple of web pages and put a nonsense word on each one.

Given that Google is pretty good about spidering blog pages, by this time tomorrow I should know the answer.

Here are the not-quite-links:

/linktest1.html

and

www.cthreepo.com/linktest2.html

Note: Here it is two days later and no index on the magic word. I checked Google, Ask, Live, AOL, Yahoo, gigablast, dogpile, mamma and technorati. I even checked with the venerable WebCrawler that I used back in the early days of the web. I will check back a couple of times in the next month, but I am guessing that unless the URL is contained in an <a> tag that it will never be indexed. Just mentioning the URL is not enough. It has to be in a link.