Search Engine Optimization? More like Googlebot Optimization, I think.
When 95%+ of search traffic comes from Google, these two things are the same thing.
Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#12A good search engine shouldn't process JS at all, and index only the content that is reachable via links pulled from HTML (which may, of course, be dynamic). The processing of JS explains a lot of the sheer garbage that is in the Google results. I think they do it because it ties into their business model. JS is needed to unearth the kind of crap that a certain segment of the user base is looking for. That certain se…
You’re forgetting that people use search to find things, not just to get their technical-snobbery nut off. If the thing I’m precisely looking for is a SPA, how could I or any average user care? Why would a search engine hide that from me?
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#13A good search engine shouldn't process JS at all, and index only the content that is reachable via links pulled from HTML (which may, of course, be dynamic). The processing of JS explains a lot of the sheer garbage that is in the Google results. I think they do it because it ties into their business model. JS is needed to unearth the kind of crap that a certain segment of the user base is looking for. That certain se…
I'm not a fan of modern js-ridden site implementations but a search engine that displays a resource different from what will actually be consumed by the user is a bad search engine.
Perhaps you can put the blame on the creator of the site, but that won't bring us anywhere if we just allow people to game the system.
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can see the results in 'fetch as Google' and in the structured data tool. Injected JS content is there, including changes to the page title and head. As always take SEO advice from Google with a grain of salt.
> As always take SEO advice from Google with a grain of salt. Why?
Well, is SEO advice just allows you to get rid of any impediments from rising to where you should in the results then you should trust them, but if SEO advice is a thing that can help you rise to a prominence that you should not have then that advice would be detrimental to Google and they would not give it to you.
So really it matters if you believe in the light or dark sides of the SEO force.
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#15Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#16SEO consultant here (yeah, yeah).
Please, still in 2019, be careful with JavaScript unless you're willing to deal with a lot of uncertainty.
Google routinely says how things are supposed to work, but there are plenty of examples where their crawlers act inconsistent to public statements. To be clear, probably not Googlebot's fault though; we as a species do a lot of weird things when building websites.
Just finished a big project with a client who had a client-side render of their react app for the customer facing website. Googlebot was VERY sporadic with how they were indexing certain parts of the site, and in general, the site lost out to inferior sites in more competitive SERPs. Server side render fixed a lot of this and rankings/traffic jumped.
It's also worth noting that the Bing/Yahoo crawlers (still a notable chunk of web traffic!) can't crawl JS. You can ignore this chunk of market share if you want but someone is going to happily take it.
As a general rule, my advice is always this: Make it as easy as possible for bots to crawl and index your site's content. The more hoops the crawler is jumping through, the worse your site will perform in search engines.
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#17Perhaps the biggest gotcha was that Googlebot was running Chromium that was years old and required polyfills that you wouldn't otherwise include anymore. Since May they run a recent Chromium though: "The new evergreen Googlebot" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20482235
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#18A good search engine shouldn't process JS at all, and index only the content that is reachable via links pulled from HTML (which may, of course, be dynamic). The processing of JS explains a lot of the sheer garbage that is in the Google results. I think they do it because it ties into their business model. JS is needed to unearth the kind of crap that a certain segment of the user base is looking for. That certain se…
This is so out-of-touch with the modern web. Lots of totally legitimate websites, including major news outlets and Wikipedia, render their web pages on the client using JavaScript. Whether or not this is a good thing is a separate issue (personally I see nothing wrong with it), but it should be obvious that a useful search engine in 2019 needs to be able to index JavaScript-rendered content.
I, for one, would welcome a force with the size and influence of Google telling devs to cut the Javascript crap. To me, it’s like violating the conditional rendering rule: there are plausible reasons to want to do it, but Google is right to push back on it.
It’s not as if totally legitimate websites don’t have reasonable technical alternatives here.
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#19A good search engine shouldn't process JS at all, and index only the content that is reachable via links pulled from HTML (which may, of course, be dynamic). The processing of JS explains a lot of the sheer garbage that is in the Google results. I think they do it because it ties into their business model. JS is needed to unearth the kind of crap that a certain segment of the user base is looking for. That certain se…
I quit catering to users who don't run JS a decade ago
"nobody in their right mind" would expect to use the web in the last 15 years or so with JS disabled and have it actually work
Re: Understand the JavaScript SEO basics
#20A good search engine shouldn't process JS at all, and index only the content that is reachable via links pulled from HTML (which may, of course, be dynamic). The processing of JS explains a lot of the sheer garbage that is in the Google results. I think they do it because it ties into their business model. JS is needed to unearth the kind of crap that a certain segment of the user base is looking for. That certain se…
I'm not a fan of modern js-ridden site implementations but a search engine that displays a resource different from what will actually be consumed by the user is a bad search engine. Perhaps you can put the blame on the creator of the site, but that won't bring us anywhere if we just allow people to game the system.
That's exactly what happens, though, and JS takes some of the blame.
The spider is indexing stuff that is the result of code execution that won't reproduce!