Are image maps (html tag - <map>) crawled by google?

Question

Does anyone know with any degree of certainty if image maps are crawled by google?

I want to implement an image bar - that has 10 logos of our partners on, and use imagemap to link to their websites. Would google's spider be able to crawl it?

<img src="planets.gif" width="145" height="126" alt="Partners" usemap="#partnermap" />

<map name="partnermap">
  <area shape="rect" coords="0,0,82,126" href="http://partner1.com" alt="Partner1" />
  <area shape="circle" coords="90,58,3" href="http://partner2.com" alt="Partner2" />
  <area shape="circle" coords="124,58,8" href="http://partner3.com" alt="Partner3" />
 etc ....
</map>

Thank you

Answer 1

I've been wondering this recently too and found this within the Google developer instructions around enterprise site search - https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/68/admin_crawl/Introduction#areatag

This suggests that the Google Search Appliance crawler will not follow these links. Whether that is also true for regular Googlebot I don't know but it would seem likely...