JavaScript is a powerful application platform of the web as it provides many features. No matter how comfortable you are with JavaScript, it is always good to stay updated of all the changes.
To help you increase your organic visibility and bring in more traffic to your site, Google added a JavaScript SEO basics section to its Search developer’s guide.
“Making your JavaScript-powered web applications discoverable via Google Search can help you find new users and re-engage existing users as they search for the content your web app provides. While Google Search runs JavaScript with an evergreen version of Chromium, there are a few things that you can optimize.” says Google.
In the guide, Google discussed that there are three main phases in which Googlebot processes JavaScript:
- Crawling
- Rendering
- Indexing
“Googlebot queues all pages for rendering, unless a robots meta tag or header tells Googlebot not to index the page. The page may stay on this queue for a few seconds, but it can take longer than that.” added Google.
In addition to the overview of how Googlebot crawls, renders and indexes JavaScript web apps, Google shared basic tips, accompanied by links to more detailed Google resources:
- Describe your page with unique titles and snippets: JavaScript helps in setting or changing the meta description as well as the title, which enable users to quickly identify the best result for their goal.
- Write compatible code: Browsers offer many APIs and JavaScript is a quickly-evolving language. So, it is important for the developers to stay updated with Googlebot’s limitations.
- Use meaningful HTTP status codes: These codes are used to find out if something went wrong when crawling the page.
- Use meta robots tags carefully: Google stated that we can prevent Googlebot from indexing a page or following links through the meta robots tag.
- Fix images and lazy-loaded content: “Images can be quite costly on bandwidth and performance. A good strategy is to use lazy-loading to only load images when the user is about to see them” added Google.
