Google says there is no need to worry about using Javascript when its related to search as this is nothing fundamentally different.
As it discussed in the latest episode of Search Off the Record podcast which consists of Google’s Martin Splitt, John Mueller, Gary Illyes, and Daniel Waisberg.
Recommendation:
Mueller put up the topic of creating a website using static site generator which realizes both of them uses the same tool, Hugo.
To make easier Hugo uses Markdown languages to generate pages & with a limitation to not understand the HTML for nofollow tags & Redirects.
Actually Mueler is creating a personal website which requires redirects which is not possible in Hugo without Javascript.
He then ask Splitt, Google’s resident javascript Expert- Is there any reason to worry about using Javascript.
Split says there is no reason to worry about.
Here’s the Splitt’s words to Mueller:
No, you don’t have to be worried about that…
A question that I often also get with JavaScript is if we treat JavaScript content differently. We do have annotations for content– what we think is the centerpiece of an article or what we think is content on the side and stuff.
But as far as I know, and as far as I can see, we crawl a page and then put the content into the document in our index, and then we render the page, and then we complete the content from the DOM.
That’s it. There’s nothing that is fundamentally different between JavaScript generated content and static content, except for when there’s edge cases, and we can’t see content that is generated by JavaScript.”
Avoid Using Javascript in a way which forces users interact with an element/image to feature the content.
As far as SEO is concerned, Google bot does not interact with anything when it crawls a page.
If you are in some confusion related to your site whether your javascript creates any kind of problem, then you can check it with Fetch as Google Tool in search Console to check what google bot can see when it crawls your site.
If the tool can fetch all the critical content then no need to worry-Splitt added.
This is a single topic discussed in podcast, Listen the full podcast below:
Google’s Search off The Record Podcast
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