08.25.08
Google can now run Javascript
It appears that the first step in making flash content spiderable Google has added the ability for googlebot to execute javascript. I’m not sure how robust it is but I do know that it can. I’m working with a client that had a very large amount of content that was previously not in Google because the content required javascript to be seen. Out of nowhere this site has over 600,000 pages of new content in Google that was previously not there.
I was very confused at first. I knew that those pages were not there before and that Google should not be able to see them. I put one of the url’s in a spider simulator and the text was being shown. I put it firefox and IE with javascript turned off and content would not show up. I put in in lynx and the content did not show up either. I wonder why and how the top spider simulators are running javascript.
Technorati Tags: firefox, flash, googlebot, internet explorer, javascript, lynx
Stumble it!
Jim Moran said,
09.04.08 at 6:54 pm
Very interesting indeed. I wonder the limitations. Are any of your client’s pages AJAX driven?
Phil Barnhart said,
09.08.08 at 8:19 pm
There are rumors that Google is experimenting with a version of Rhino to execute js on the server site. This may be tied to their hosting of AJAX-related libraries like Dojo and Prototype.
Christoph C. Cemper said,
09.16.08 at 9:28 am
Now this is a VERY VERY interesting finding.
I wonder what all those sneaky javascript redirecting spammers do
once this works perfect from Google’s view.
best,christoph
Dion Almaer said,
09.17.08 at 5:37 am
Hi guys,
I work with the Ajax Libraries API at Google, which is where we host the popular libraries such as Dojo, Prototype, Scriptaculous jQuery, Mootools, and more.
That project is purely about hosting JavaScript files…. and doesn’t do anything else
Cheers,
Dion Almaer
Open Web Advocate at Google
Matteo said,
09.17.08 at 5:43 am
It’s very interesting, as you say some weeks ago Google announced that flash sites were crawlable too and also that they were working on implement a way to follow javascript code in order to index flash movies called by js.
Probably it’s something related to this… btw may I ask you a thing? In the website you noticed this are you using a js calls with onclick only or with also an href link in order to allow ppl without js installed to browse the website?
Because if you are using this probably the site has been crawled thanks to this.
Search Engine Marketing - headland said,
09.22.08 at 7:51 am
This is interesting and all the major search engines including Google are working hard to crawl JavaScript and Flash. As mentioned in the start of post, important thing is how robust this will be.
We need to consider this as a first step and I hope this will open new horizons for the world of internet marketing.
Somik Ranjan Roy said,
09.24.08 at 4:36 am
If that is the case then surely contents obtained in the form of RSS Feed in Java Script will be crawled by Google. In that case we surely do not have to convert contents obtained as JavaScript to HTML on websites for fresh contents to rank well with Google search engines. But has this facility to bot JavaScript been officially declared by Google?
ogletree said,
10.02.08 at 8:53 am
The site uses javascript as an include. When I go to the google cache it shows the content that can only be viewed if you run javascript. The content is saved in a database and the only way to pull it out is by running javascript.
charlie said,
10.03.08 at 12:44 pm
I recently realised Google must be executing javascript when I found I could google email addresses on my web pages that were cloaked using js.
Sales Training Melbourne said,
11.07.08 at 1:22 am
great news, thanks for sharing. I found this site while searching for an article about the SEO.
Internet Marketing Strategy said,
11.13.08 at 5:31 pm
They’ve been working on decoding Javascript and Flash for their browsers for some time. It will be interesting to see how this impacts code that was thought to be hidden. It seems that more and more search engine spiders are scanning sites and making public information that the website owners wished would remain private.
Polat Alemdar said,
11.30.08 at 5:25 am
I read about Google can crawl Flash sites better but I’ve heard now Google can execute JavaScript files. It’s very interesting.
martha said,
12.06.08 at 12:53 am
Thanks for sharing the post…
Really nice…
Sreejith Sasidharan said,
12.17.08 at 10:58 pm
Nice to know about this, but then how we can relay on Google analytics !!! Which is poorly working on JS and will it avoid reports for bot crawls. There are many traffic analysis done using the JS reporting tools like Hitbox.