Google’s John Mueller said in a Google Hangout yesterday that if you deploy an on-hover event that will turn text on your web page into links, GoogleBot most likely won’t see those as links. Why? GoogleBot won’t be using it’s mouse to scroll over the text on your page and thus, most likely won’t trigger the on-hover event.

The question came up in the hangout at the 35:30 mark into the video where someone asked if they use jQuery to hide links from content stealers but wanted GoogleBot to see them, would it work.

The question:

John’s response:

So it seems you should not take this approach.

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at Google+.