Google updates indexing to execute JavaScript

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html?utm_source=javascriptweekly&utm_medium=email

by edsykes • 12 years ago

29 10 12 years ago

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

gavinpc• 12 years ago

This was posted earlier this week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7805144

What I'm wondering is, if you have a server than supports "both" methods (dynamic page and "fallback"), how do you know which one to serve? And should they be at different addresses? If they weren't, wouldn't this break caching? If they were, how can you redirect from a "noscript" tag if you have um, no script? Etc etc.

tjgq• 12 years ago

Google has a system [0] whereby their crawler appends a special parameter to the query string to signal that you should serve a static, "indexable" version.

What I get from this announcement is that their crawler is becoming good enough at executing dynamic pages that having to serve a separate static version may soon become unnecessary.

[0] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...

rhizome• 12 years ago

having to serve a separate static version may soon become unnecessary.

...for the purposes of being indexed by Google.

evv2• 12 years ago

Personally, I hate and avoid the practice of building twice, once for SEO and once for usability.

I am always careful to build dynamic apps which render the HTML correctly on the server. Its handy not just for SEO. It also allows you to support legacy browsers and it dramatically decreases load times.

But if google is the only search engine you care about, and load times and legacy browsers don't matter to you, by all means, continue building one-page JS apps. There are often less headaches to be had when you go the simple route.

edsykes3• 12 years ago

ahh sorry about that. I searched but didn't spot this.

they mention some upcoming tooling that might help "To make things easier to debug, we're currently working on a tool for helping webmasters better understand how Google renders their site. We look forward to making it to available for you in the coming days in Webmaster Tools. "

habosa• 12 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7790227

edsykes3• 12 years ago

ah nice one, no mention of google in the title so I missed this.

arasmussen• 12 years ago

This seems a few years late... given that a ton of content is generated with JS nowadays and it has been this way for years

Google updates indexing to execute JavaScript

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