Going beyond JavaScript SEO is a must. Here’s how technical SEO pros can use their knowledge of batch-optimized rendering for better search visibility.

Want to make sure that your content gets properly accessed by search engines and ranks high?

In his SEJ eSummit session, Bartosz Góralewicz presented how Google is rendering websites on a large scale and shared insights based on Google’s patents and documentation.

Here’s a recap of his presentation.

The Problem with JavaScript

Góralewicz and his team found that 40% of content relying on JavaScript is not indexed after 14 days.

It gets worse.

Ten percent of URLs within an average domain are not indexed by Google and we’re talking unique indexable URLs.

This is something to look at, especially since these trends are changing over time and can get worse.

In 2015, Google claimed that they are good with rendering saying:

“[A]s long as you’re not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files, we are generally able to render and understand your web pages like modern browsers.”

Since 2017, Góralewicz and his team have created a lot of other experiments, including cloaking experiments with JavaScript and others, that revealed crawling and indexing issues encountered by JavaScript-based websites.

That same year, Google started talking openly about JavaScript SEO.

Today, while we have Google’s Martin Splitt who has been incredibly helpful to the SEO community, there are still questions left unanswered.

In November 2019 at the Chrome Developer Summit, Splitt announced that the median for rendering at Google has improved from up to a week a year before to only five seconds in 2019.

However, Góralewicz and the Onely team’s additional research found that “the median rendering delay may be virtually non-existent for new websites, the delay in indexing JavaScript content is still very much there.”

Many JavaScript-powered websites don’t get indexed and don’t rank even after two weeks.

#seo #javascript #programming