Google and Dynamic Javascript Content
March 12, 2007 | Comments (1) | Filed under: SEO
In the new age of Web 2.0 development, often times you come across sites that are beautiful to look at and have some fairly complicated AJAX interfaces. Tools like Scriptaculous and JQuery almost make it too easy to incorporate this type of functionality into your your site. However, today I read a post from Brain Handles where they experimented with dynamic JavaScript content, specifically adding text to the page via document.write commands, to see whether Google parses the content. The results are quite interesting from an SEO standpoint…
The test page had three pairs of nonsense words that, at the time of its creation, generated no hits in a Google search. Two were placed in the page via straight HTML. Two were placed in the page via a JavaScript that was part of the document. Two were placed in the page via a JavaScript on a different server that was sourced from within the page (<script type=”text/javascript” language=”javascript” src=”URL to script on other server”>).
[…]
I then searched for each of the six words at Google.
- The two HTML words both generated a search result that included the page.
- The two words inserted by a JavaScript in the page generated no search results.
- The two words inserted by a remotely sourced JavaScript generated no search results.
While the author fully plans to continue his test to see if Google parses dynamic javascript content in a second pass, I think the results are already noteworthy in that we know it doesn’t do it in the first pass. So, if your site is SEO’d on keywords that are placed in your page dynamically, you might want to reconsider your strategy for content generation. This is definitely something to consider when planning to design your new site and build in fancy interface eye candy. What do you take from this?
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My friends hid the menu content and duplicate content using javascript and called in the html files from the javascript. Their ranking did not change, BUT their supplementals went down to 0 and they know have 5 times the visitors from google. I just dont have time to do something like that