From the SMX East Conference in New York City, September 27-29, 2016. SESSION: What to Do When Google Can't Understand Your JavaScript. PRESENTATION: What to Do When Google Can't Understand Your JavaScript - Given by Jody O'Donnell, @gimpslice - Merkle Inc., SEO Technical Director. #SMX #22A2

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What To Do When
Google Can't
Understand Your
JavaScript

2. #SMX #22A2 @gimpslice
Jody J. O’Donnell
SEO Technical Director
Merkle, Inc

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Websites need to be Discoverable and Crawlable
Webpages need to be understood through SEO signals
Webpages need their Content to be Scored correctly to be Indexed
Websites need to be Indexed properly to Rank
Let’s Start with the Basics

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We are not going to talk about Bing except in the traditional sense
of reading the HTTP Headers and the HTML Source
Bing and the other search engines still require HTML snapshots:
§ HTML Snapshots and the rendered DOM by a normal browser engine (read
by Google) should be identical
Oh…Bing.

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First thing you did was turn JS
off in new browsers
JavaScript wasn’t the problem,
but it took the blame.
Lookin’ at you MSIE 3-6
The Browser Wars

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It wasn’t that JavaScript got better
§ Microsoft decided to play ball
§ Internet Explorer got better
Today, JavaScript is one of the most popular programming
languages in the world
So…What Happened?

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jQuery and Mootools came out in
less than a year of each other
Out of the box solutions for free!
Client-Side Applications that use
tradition HTML and CSS statements
JavaScript Libraries

8. #SMX #22A2 @gimpslice
Development is much faster when
you reference a free library rather
than create it each time
§ Browser compatibility was a bigger deal, too
It worked with SEO!
What did this do for Us?

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SEO Ain’t All That
§ User experience is more important than
ever
§ Attention spans are short
§ We can't hold technology hostage
because of SEO
At the End of the Day

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Libraries Evolved to entire frameworks
Frameworks were out of the box solutions
for creating apps
§ Apps can be on client or server
§ The frameworks created out of the box MVC’s
Programmers are now free to concentrate
on functionality
JavaScript Frameworks

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From an SEO standpoint, we look at the result
§ Our examination is in the code, not the backend to produce it
We are not going to discuss the differences between the
frameworks
§ Nor the client-side vs. server-side rendering
§ SPA’s and frameworks should be able to produce 1 URL to one piece of
unique content
SPA’s and JavaScript Frameworks

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They built a history API call
between the Code and the
browser
Specifically, a function called
pushState()
Two of those variables
§ Title Tag
§ URL
History API - pushState()

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SEO’s need to understand the
difference between:
§ HTTP Headers
§ HTML Source
§ HTML Snapshot
§ Rendered DOM
Different Places to Look

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All search engines have two
orders
§ HTTP Headers
– x-robots-tag, link:canonical,
link:hreflang
§ HTML Source
– meta robots tag, <link> canonical,
<link> hreflang
SEO Signals by Order of Precedence

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DOM – The Third Order

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JavaScript redirects are treated
in a similar manner as 301
redirects
What were the Results?

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Dynamically inserted content is
treated in an equivalent
whether in the HTML source or
in the DOM.
§ This goes with SEO Signals as well
What were the Results?

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One of the tests that failed
§ The rel=“nofollow” tag was completely ignored in the DOM
We think this is an Order of Precedence problem
§ Crawl signals are picked up starting in the HTML source, looking for the
rel=”nofollow” signal
§ Essentially, a deduping mechanism maybe responsible
One Discrepancy

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SEO Signal:
§ we will pick it up and use it the first time
we see it
Content:
§ More of a mixed bag, they could choose
which content they score and index
SEO Signal vs. Content

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As a secondary effect, our article got picked up in a hackernews
thread
The single piece that came from this whole discussion was a small
part with a self-purported Ex-Google Employee
§ Discussion about if google would wait for 120 seconds before taking the
snapshot in case of injected content
§ Google engineer did agree that they did and it was a fixed time
Was it true?
Hackernews

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Google Fetch & Render PageSpeed Insights
www.maxxeight.com/js-timer/

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Most Ecom sites have category
pages with hundreds of
products to list
The Category Page Conundrum

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You had three choices:
§ View-All Pages
§ Paginated Pages
§ Lazy Loading (which didn’t
have an SEO option)
The Category Page Conundrum

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Infinite scroll changed with
HTML 5’s History API
Now we can tie a JS Listening
Handler with a pushState() call
§ You can push {{ URL + ?page=2 }} into the
URL bar
– REMEMBER: You can update title tag here, too
Infinite Scroll + HTML5

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Search engines can reference
any of the individual pages and
render the HTML equivalent of
that single page
§ THIS IS WHAT YOU DO WITH
PAGINATION ALREADY!!!
Infinite Scroll + HTML5

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The user scrolls as far as they
want
Fantastic User Experience
Infinite Scroll + HTML5

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There is a problem
We still need links!
Partial Solution

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The rendered HTML version of
the DOM should be a working
HTML copy of the page
§ When you “Inspect Element” you
are seeing the visual
representation of the DOM
The Rendered DOM

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HTML Snapshots should be as
close to an exact HTML instance
of the DOM as possible
Googlebot does not need these
at this time
Let’s Talk Snapshots

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Do not have conflicting signals
between the Orders of Precedence
§ Be consistent between the HTTP
Headers, HTML Source and rendered
DOM
Conflicting SEO Signals

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In order for the DOM to fully render correctly, the browser needs
access to all the assets being requested for the page
This is true for googlebot to render the DOM, too
§ If googlebot can’t access assets like JavaScript, page renders can be
incomplete
Crawl Signals – Robots.txt

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Crawl signals can be picked up anywhere in the:
§ HTTP Headers (canonicals)
§ HTML Source (links)
§ DOM (links)
Crawl signals should be consistent between the Orders of
Precedence
§ Conflicting, or signals that only appear only in the DOM (such as the
rel=“nofollow”) might not be seen or interpreted correctly
Crawl Signals

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The web is still based on links
A JS function is not a hyperlink
element
§ We have seen Google incorrectly create
URL “strings” and generate URLs that
don’t exist
Onclick + window.location != <a href=”#”>

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Navigation still needs to be links
that go to the correct page
Same with Faceted Navigation
§ Each facet link needs to correspond
to an actual page in the click+reload
method
§ The actual loading can be AJAX calls
for the user
Crawl Signals - Navigation

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Googlebot is a lame user
Googlebot doesn’t click on buttons and doesn’t scroll down the
page, etc
§ Therefore the content needs to be loaded in the DOM automatically, not
based on user interactions
§ We haven't seen AJAX sequences being indexed and interpreted by
Googlebot.
Content Considerations

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1 URL per piece of content and 1
piece of content per URL –
§ It is essential to have every piece of
content accessible via its own URL
§ Single Page Applications (SPAs) should
actually not be using a “single page” or
single URL when delivering the content
Changing Content Best Practices

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Tabbed content should all be in
the DOM
§ Same way we would want it if we
were talking about putting it in the
HTML source to begin with
Changing Content

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Because of the DOM Snapshot
(5 seconds)
§ Content injected automatically
after 5 seconds won’t be scored or
indexed
§ SEO signals after 5 seconds won’t
be included in the scoring
§ HTML Snapshots need to align
here with the content within that 5
second cutoff
Content - DOM Timeouts

42. #SMX #22A2 @gimpslice
Reviews on pages are
generally like old lazy load
pages
§ The first grouping is loaded
in the DOM
§ The rest are AJAX calls
§ Reviews behind the AJAX
calls will most likely still not
be indexed
Content - Reviews

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Indexation signal directives should be
aligned as well
§ X-Robots-Tag and Meta Robots “noindex”
§ JavaScript Redirects
Indexation signal hints
§ Rel next/prev consolidation signals
§ Link Canonical tags
§ Link Alternate tags
Index Signals

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SPA’s and Status Codes

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SPA’s and Status Codes

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If URL doesn’t exist ->
§ JS redirect to a page that actually 404
§ Do not use Meta-Equiv Refresh to redirect
If you need to redirect:
– 302 – It needs to be server side before before the JS app loads (rewrite rule)
– 301 - same as 302 or JS redirect (considered as 301 by Google)
Status Code Challenges

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HTTP Headers, HTML Source, HTML Snapshots and the DOM all
contain SEO signals
§ Google is looking at all three Orders of Precedence for signals
§ Bing/Rest of world look at it through the traditional two orders
§ Be consistent in your content and SEO signals
A Signal is a Signal is a Signal

50. #SMX #22A2 @gimpslice
Google is dumping the DOM
§ Line up content and SEO signal at all levels of precedence
§ The DOM should be an HTML representation of the working page
§ Look at your pages in Fetch and Render to see how Google is able to render
the page
Googlebot only as Good as the DOM

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Googlebot can’t render dynamic content driven by user interactions
such as click and mouseover
§ It isn’t a user, it isn’t going to interact with the page beyond a link or a post
§ It won’t “scr0ll” to the bottom of the page
§ You need to assign a unique URL to each piece of unique content
Googlebot is a Lame User

52. #SMX #22A2 @gimpslice
We Tested JavaScript!
§ http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-
learned-220157
Hacknews Thread
§ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9529782
Angular Air Hangout
§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxulee01zyY
Links to articles referenced

53. #SMX #22A2 @gimpslice
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