Scripts question

[lojdqvist]

My question is whether search engines will crawl the page before or after scripts run on the page. I have a H1 that will be replaced with a canvas by jquery script. Will search engines see the H1 or the canvas?

[Solvari]

Hi,

Search engines will index the final html, not the scripts that generate the html.

[lojdqvist]

Thanks, but can you please be more specific? Do you mean that search engines runs the scripts, then sees the final html – as in the html after scripts are executed? Or that they don’t run the scripts, so the “final html” is what we see in “view source” before the page is “finished” and scripts are executed?

Seems strange that Google would execute scripts. Wouldn’t that be a security risk?

[Solvari]

Google doen't run your script, this happens on your server. When Google wants to crawl a page, it requests this url from your server. The server will run the scripts and deliver the final html to the Google crawler. This code is equal to what you see in 'view source'.

I hope this explains it a bit more.

[lojdqvist]

Sorry but I'm still a bit confused.

By ”this code is equal to what you see in ’view source’”, do you actually mean “view source” or “view generated source”? Because “View source” would imply that Google sees the un-scripted html.

Could you really run javascript on a server? Do you mean that our server will run a client javascript before sending it to Google..? (Let’s say we add an A href tag dynamically by javascript, will this A tag be crawled by Google?)

Thanks!

[Solvari]

I mean 'view source' not generated source. What I tried to say is that Google will see exactly the same code as you do when you right click on a page and click 'View source code'. So to answer your first question _' I have a H1 that will be replaced with a canvas by jquery script. Will search engines see the H1 or the canvas?'  _Just check the source code of your page to find out.

Javascript/ajax can cause problems for Google to index the content as far I know, but I'm not an expert in this.