Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : SEO / SEM Discussions : javascript and search engines

[mwheelan]

Hi

Can search engines index the content printed by javascript code?

For example the comments script below works with javascript but the actual comments do not appear in the html. Would the comments be indexed in search engines?

thanks for your answers

mark

http://www.phpjabbers.com/post-comment/samples.php

[the_pm]

My understanding is that the answer is no. Search engines will only index the text presented as <noscript>, not actual JS-generated text.

To be honest, I haven't investigated this in a couple years. So it's possible search engines have incorporated JavaScript parsers into their bots, but everything I've learned over the years says not to count on JS-enable content being indexed.

[incrediblehelp]

Their has bene talks that Googlebot is getting better at crawling JavaScripts, but nothing definite.

[dhelfman]

It's generally a good rule of thumb to include <noscript> versions of pretty much all of your content that you'd like crawled by search engines. It doesn't have to be pretty or functional, but it should at least include all of the text that you'd like indexed.

[mwheelan]

well in my case the noscript will not be very useful because the javascript is displaying user comments.

[Melnel]

Its either a case of yes they can or no they can't. If they can read the contents of the javascript then there is nothing to worry about but the noscript version will not hurt anything. If they can't then you need the noscript tag.

BTW the noscript tag is required in some countries and strongly recommended in others to assist those who cannot read the printed screen and so rely on readers which cannot read JS.

In any case put in the JS it won't hurt anything. If you are saying that the user comments cannot be read until they are made then you should have your JS create the noscript version too.

[the_pm]

Originally Posted by mwheelan

well in my case the noscript will not be very useful because the javascript is displaying user comments.

<noscript> is actually a very useful mechanism. It sounds to me like the script you're using to display your comments is the part that isn't useful

Get something that handles this function at the server level instead of the client level. JavaScript should never be used as the vehicle to display page content - it should be restricted to behavioral/functional enhancements only!