We Tested How Googlebot Crawls Javascript And Here's What We Learned

Updated: at 10:46 PM

This study announces a big win for single-page apps that are concerned with SEO

Think Google can’t handle JavaScript? Think again. Contributor Adam Audette shares the results of a series of tests conducted by his colleagues at Merkle | RKG to examine how different JavaScript functions would be crawled and indexed by Google.

TL;DR

  1. We ran a series of tests that verified Google is able to execute and index JavaScript with a multitude of implementations. We also confirmed Google is able to render the entire page and read the DOM, thereby indexing dynamically generated content.

  2. SEO signals in the DOM (page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, meta robots tags, etc.) are respected. Content dynamically inserted in the DOM is also crawlable and indexable. Furthermore, in certain cases, the DOM signals may even take precedence over contradictory statements in HTML source code. This will need more work, but was the case for several of our tests.

Read more from the source: Search Engine Land