On my website, I have a booking widget at the top of each page to allow visitors to enter our booking engine. The code behind it uses quite a bit of HTML, pushing down the content on each page in the source. In an attempt to better my SEO, I decided to have the code placed in a DIV tag at the bottom of the page, and, when the DOM is ready, I use JQuery to physically move the DIV from the bottom of the DOM to the top where it needs to be to render correctly.
My question is if this is really helping SEO? Does Google look at the DOM/Source after all Javascript has run, or before? Does moving these few hundred lines of HTML to the bottom of the HTML source gain me any advantage?
Spiders do not process javascript. So any content that appears/moves or is created by javascript will appear as if it hasn't been moved or created at all.
I'd be really surprised if web crawlers execute the scripts on the page. They probably scan the raw response.
That doesnot have any effect on the SEO.
But placing the javascript at the bottom will defnitely help you to load the webpages faster.
There is no harm for SEO as well, you can defnitely proceed with your approach
There is a distinction between javascript executed on load versus during the user session. The on-load javascript is more times than not indexed by google. The dynamic content or alterations on the client side are not well indexed.
So, it can't be ignored.
Related
I have a webpage whit many areas whose visibility can get toggled by the user.
The default visibility state for those area is hidden (css, display: none).
I don't have control to what's going to be put inside, but it could be a lot of images.
I saw with firefox's network observer all images where loaded with the page. This is quite a waste of bandwidth since the user might choose not to display every areas.
I came to a workarround, I put all that content inside a <script type="late-rendering"></script> and to avoid any potential conflict (eg: "" inside the content), I replace all "<" with "8691jQfdtxm" (randomly picked string). Then when the user want to make an area visible, I just fill the area with that content after replacing 8691jQfdtxm with "<".
It works fine, but I think proceeding like this will make crawlers (eg: Google) think my webpage is pure garbage. How could I avoid that?
Unless search engines were heavily relying on the alt tags of your images, or their filenames, there is little risk you will loose search rankings. If your site does load more quickly instead, it will provide a better user experience, which will be probably detected by Google, and this influences rankings positively.
Google executes a lot of Javascript these days. And your trick of breaking the html with a random string seems hokey to me.
I would preload all the textual content ( e.g. have it all in there on first load, with the div closed via display:none ). This content will not count as much as visible content - but it does count.
Then I'd do a delayed loading of the images. Like with make all your images something like:
<img src="blank.jpg" loadlater="realimage.jpg">
blank.jpg can be a tiny image. when the div opens you can use javascript/jquery to rewrite each src with loadlater.
I have a client who wants a feature on his site that he has seen on a competitors. It is essentially a group of icons where, when you mouseover them, an extended tooltip appears with content, links, etc...
The tooltips are not hidden divs. The tooltip content appears nowhere in the source code of the page itself. I believe the text of the tooltips is being called from an external file (e.g. an XML file or some such thing) via javascript.
My question(s) are this:
a) since the tooltip content isn't actually on the page, does it even affect SEO efforts at all?
b) would Google consider this spam (or at best questionable)?
Many thanks!
a) since the tooltip content isn't actually on the page, does it even
affect SEO efforts at all?
It wont affect SEO efforts in the slightest
b) would Google consider this spam (or at best questionable)?
No.
I should also point out from an accesibility point of view this is pretty bad practice as well.
a) No, all content loaded from external scripts won't be considered relevant for SEO. So it's just like you don't have extra content.
If your text is in display: none or visibility: hidden , it will affect SEO but make sure that user have access to the content.
b) No because you just want to give extra information and it won't be used by Google. Google takes content as spam when it is hidden and user doesn't have access.
Let says someone has 'legitimately' hidden content within a page.
To explain this further, imagine the following:
<div id="tab-one">This is the content inside tab one</div>
<div id="tab-two">This is the content inside tab two</div>
Tab one
Tab two
From an seo perspective, assuming that none of this is done to manipulate google. And in fact, "tab two" contains spam free, relevant data, how does this impact seo?
Will googlebot index, and conciser the 'hidden' content as part of the content of the page?
Will it use this content in the same way as though the content was "visible" on the page without the use of javacscript?
Thanks.
I don't believe there's an official Google response on this topic in the past, however, from experience I can tell you that Google will index the tabbed content just fine. You'll even see SEO traffic from the content. If you're site is fairly clean, I wouldn't worry about being flagged as having "hidden content", as long as the content is accessible by user action (e.g. clicking), and obviously clickable.
However, you'll want to consider this. Say for example, some of the content in a hidden tab is a product description such as "child safe". If a users is looking for "child safe products", and they arrive at your site through a search engine, they probably won't immediate see that information because they don't know it's buried behind a tab.
Most users don't spend a lot of time hunting, so to a user they might not find the content and bounce because they don't feel like they found the relevant information they were looking for. If you subscribe to the idea that Google and Bing use search query refinements as a search signal, this could potentially "harm" your SEO.
Personally, unless it's truly tertiary information, I wouldn't put it behind a tab unless crucial to the Ux. From my experience, users don't mind scrolling if the information is relevant ... but they tend to have "tab" blindness or only really interact with "hidden" elements when it's part of the navigation or already in a transactional flow.
p.s. An alternative is to use crawlable AJAX or pushState() to have the individual tabs indexed separately on their own URLs. But you'll want to be careful ... if you're rendering out the main content on the tab "pages", you might have a duplicate content concern. If it makes sense, you can potentially use the rel="next" and rel="prev" spec that Google released (but only supported by Google right now).
In Webmaster Tools you will find the option to Fetch as Google. There you can see just how Google is crawling the page. I've noticed some JavaScript carousel libraries are crawled, while others aren't. It's just a matter of how Google is able to read the JavaScript code.
As far as impact goes, it's not like all hidden content is bad. The content is still crawled (As you will see with the fetch). Now if there was an abundance of keyword-stuffed content, that would be susceptible to penalty.
Used correctly, it's definitely still beneficial.
The hidden content will be crawled, and this is not a problem for Google, many sites have this kind of menu. I suppose the hidden tabs are not keywords stuffed and useful for the users, so you shouldn't worry about this - it is useful for the user and googlebot!
I have a page containing <div> tags with onclick="" code that calls an ajax request to get json data, and then iterates through the results to form links (<a />) to append to the page. These links do not exist in any other place on my website. How can I make these dynamically generated links crawlable?
My initial thought was to turn the <div> tags into <a> tags with a href="#", but with my limited knowledge of how typical crawlers work, i don't think this would solve my problem since the "#" would be what's recognized by the crawler, and not necessarily the dynamically generated output. This is besides the point that i don't want the scroll positioning to be altered at all, which would also rule out giving the <a> tag an id and having it reference itself.
Do I have any options aside from making a new page containing all of the links i need to be crawled? Thanks.
As a general rule, content that is created or made available through JavaScript cannot be found or indexed by search engines. Google does support crawlable Ajax but using it as the only means of accessing your content is bad for accessibility. Also, other search engines can't get to that content which is also not a good thing. Basically crawable ajax is a bad thing.
You should always make your content available without requiring JavaScript to get it. Then you can improve your site by adding JavaScript to make getting the content faster or easier. This is called Progressive Enhancement and is how good websites are built.
I have setup some dropdown menus allowing users to find pages on my website by selecting options across multiple dropdowns:
eg. Color of Car, Year
This would generate a link like: mysite.xyz/blue/2010/
The only problem is, because this link is dynamically assembled with Javascript, I've also had to assemble each possible combination from the dropdowns into a list like:
<noscript>
No javascript enabled? Here are all the links:
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2009/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/blue/2010/'>mysite.xyz/blue/2010/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2009/'>mysite.xyz/red/2009/</a>
<a href='mysite.xyz/red/2010/'>mysite.xyz/red/2010/</a>
</noscript>
My question is, if I put these in a tag like this, will I be penalized or anything by search engines such as Google? I've already been doing so for some navigational stuff which required offsets etc. However, now I would be listing a whole list of links here too. I want to provide them here, moreso so that google can actually index my pages - but for those without javascript, they can still navigate too.
Your thoughts? Also.. even though I have some links that appear to have been indexed, I AM NOT 100% SURE, which is why I'm asking :P
If the noscript code represents an alternative to the javascript code, then it should be fine I think, but Google does try to spot fishy seo and may penalize, so it's better to avoid doing this when possible.
In your case, consider spending some time making a drop down menu such that you can have the links on the page in a list item and use javascript + css to simulate a drop down menu, this way you will not need to use the noscript tag.
A decade ago, I made my website using image links for internal navigation (this at a time when CSS was brand-new and HTML4 Transitional was normal). I then added text navigation links at the bottom of the page.
I believe this (and your idea) is a common enough technique that, as long as you really aren't trying to do something sketchy, Google et al should interpret correctly.
I think the noscript tag is irrelevant, but having a giant list of links links may make their algorithms think you're doing some fishy SEO. Like having a wall of keywords.
Google (or whoever) would index these, and as long as you're not going overboard with a bunch of BS links I don't see a problem. Though from an SEO standpoint, it's not good to create menus from javascript or flash. I might look for an alternative that uses anchor tags with some CSS to dress it up.