If your work involves SEO at some level, you’ve most likely been hearing more and more about JavaScript and the implications it has on crawling and indexing. Frankly, Googlebot struggles with it, and many websites utilize modern-day JavaScript to load in crucial content today. Because of this, we need to be equipped to discuss this topic when it comes up in order to be effective.
The goal of this post is to equip you with the minimum viable knowledge required to do so. This post won’t go into the nitty gritty details, describe the history, or give you extreme detail on specifics. There are a lot of incredible write-ups that already do this — I suggest giving them a read if you are interested in diving deeper (I’ll link out to my favorites at the bottom[1]).
In order to be effective consultants when it comes to the topic of JavaScript and SEO, we need to be able to answer three questions:
- Does the domain/page in question rely on client-side JavaScript to load/change on-page content or links?
- If yes, is Googlebot seeing the content that’s loaded in via JavaScript properly?
- If not, what is the ideal solution?
With some quick searching, I was able to find three examples of landing pages that utilize JavaScript to load in crucial content.
I’m going to be using Sitecore’s Symposium landing page through each of these talking points to illustrate how to answer the questions above.
We’ll cover the “how do I do this” aspect first, and at the end I’ll expand on a few core concepts and link to further resources.
Question 1: Does the domain in question rely on client-side JavaScript to load/change on-page content or links?
The first step to