A lot of people don’t know that Google has been executing Javascript in the HTML pages and including the output in their index. We found this a few months back. We noticed a website with Javascript drop down menus and no static links at all had most of their pages indexed by Google.
What does it change for SEO and webmasters?
- Links in Javascript are counted as “regular” links – Links which are displayed on your webpages after Javascript execution will be included by Google as part of your link graph. This is a good thing because you can use Javascript to add links to improve user experience. Bad thing about this is that all your outbound links will also be treated as “regular” links. You will have to make sure that you point it to Google and other search engines that they need to exclude the internal and outbound links which you prefer. As Matt Cutts explains that you can either nofollow or exclude the link or js file using robots.txt. See video for more detail.
- Duplicate Content Issues – We have seen multi level drop down menus and option boxes causing Google to crawl and index duplicate content following URL patterns based on the GET strings. One of the advanced optimization technique used by SEOs for work flows is to add static links on the pages to next steps, but use a drop down menu for a better customer experience. For instance the URLs for steps may look like /step1.html -> /step2.html -> /step3.html. However, its counterpart form might generate URLs like /step1.html?v=widget1 -> /step2.html?v=widget1&x=widget2 -> /step3.html?v=widget1&x=widget2&y=submit.
These would certainly create multiple URLs for the same content. Solutions to these may involve adding optional parameters in Google Webmaster Tools (only for Google) or perhaps using POST instead of GET. - Obfuscation may not work – A lot of website owners use Javascript to obfuscate email addresses, phone numbers or even product prices in certain cases. This will get Google index and serve (display) the obfuscated content in Google results. Matt Cutts recommends not using Javascript to obfuscate emails (or other things). He mentions that using robots.txt to disallow the js file is the last thing you should try to obfuscate. Checkout his video:
Note: Even though Google and other search engines have advanced to read links in JS, your internal (or external) links can not be entirely replaced by Javascript yet.
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