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Friday, May 23, 2014
In 1998 when our servers were running in Susan Wojcicki's garage, we didn't really have to worry about JavaScript or CSS. They weren't used much, or, JavaScript was used to make page elements... blink! A lot has changed since then. The web is full of rich, dynamic, amazing websites that make heavy use of JavaScript. Today, we'll talk about our capability to render richer websites—meaning we see your content more like modern Web browsers, include the external resources, execute JavaScript and apply CSS.
Traditionally, we were only looking at the raw textual content that we'd get in the HTTP response body and didn't really interpret what a typical browser running JavaScript would see. When pages that have valuable content rendered by JavaScript started showing up, we weren't able to let searchers know about it, which is a sad outcome for both searchers and webmasters.
In order to solve this problem, we decided to try to understand pages by executing JavaScript. It's hard to do that at the scale of the current web, but we decided that it's worth it. We have been gradually improving how we do this for some time. In the past few months, our indexing system has been rendering a substantial number of web pages more like an average user's browser with JavaScript turned on.
Sometimes things don't go perfectly during rendering, which may negatively impact search results for your site. Here are a few potential issues, and—where possible,—how you can help prevent them from occurring:
To make things easier to debug, we're currently working on a tool for helping webmasters better understand how Google renders their site. We look forward to making it to available for you in the coming days in Webmaster Tools.
If you have any questions, please you can visit our help forum.
Posted by Erik Hendriks and Michael Xu, Software Engineers, and Kazushi Nagayama, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google's indexing system is now rendering a significant number of web pages with JavaScript enabled to better understand dynamic content."],["Webmasters should ensure Googlebot can access JavaScript and CSS files to facilitate proper rendering and indexing, particularly for mobile websites."],["Websites should be designed to degrade gracefully for users and search engines that may not have JavaScript capabilities, ensuring content accessibility."],["Potential issues with rendering may include server overload due to crawl requests, overly complex JavaScript, and JavaScript removing content, which webmasters should address."],["Google is developing a tool in Webmaster Tools to aid webmasters in understanding how Google renders their websites."]]],["Google's indexing system now renders web pages more like a typical browser, including executing JavaScript and applying CSS. Key actions include allowing Googlebot to retrieve JavaScript and CSS resources, ensuring servers can handle crawl requests, and having sites degrade gracefully. Complex or content-removing JavaScript can hinder indexing. A tool is in development to help webmasters understand how their site is rendered, and the team recommends checking the help forum.\n"]]
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