Question on noscript tags and indexing

[IrvCo_Interactive]

If I have a

<noscript>tag on every page of my website with the same sentence over and over saying something to the effect of "Sorry our site uses Javascript, please enable javascript for the full site experience.", Webmaster Tools will tell me that one of the most common words on my site is "Javascript".</p> <p>Is this something to be concerned about from an SEO perspective? My site is obviously not about Javascript and I don't want to dilute my page's topic or authority by repeating words that are not relevant to the topic of my site.</p> <p>Thanks!</p></noscript>

[FedeEinhorn]

Most modern browsers run javascript, and most users have Javascript enabled and running as sites today use it more and more. I would definitely remove that noscript tag and all within. It is actually not adding any value while it can cause google to recognize your site as something related to javascript.

[john4math]

I had a similar problem, Google was picking up

<noscript>text and using it as the description for our pages in some SERPs.  We didn't want to remove them, so we tried using "googleoff" and "googleon" tags, which are just HTML comments that Googlebot can read.  You can read their documentation <a href="https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/68/admin_crawl/Preparing#pagepart" target="_blank">here</a>.  We wrapped the text in the <noscript> with these comments, and it worked like a charm, so it does look like Google respects these tags.</p> <p>If I were you, I'd go ahead and add the syntax if it's easy for you to do (i.e. only have to add it a few places in the code, not in thousands).  It's probably not great for your SEO that Google thinks your site is about Javascript.  Or you can do what Frederico says and remove it.  Only you know your user base, but he's probably right.  Almost everyone for the most part everyone has Javascript enabled these days.</p> <p>I originally read about this in the Quora thread <a href="http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-hasnt-Google-banned-Quora-for-hiding-answers-from-search-engine-visitors" target="_blank">here</a>.  Quora Uses it to control what text Googlebot can index on their pages.  If you want to see an example of it on my site, you can view one of our skills <a href="http://www.ixl.com/math/pre-k/identify-circles-squares-and-triangles" target="_blank">here</a>.</p></noscript>

[IrvCo_Interactive]

John,

You just literally blew my mind with that googleon/googleoff documentation! I've been working as an SEO since 2001 and have literally never heard of this! I have so many questions I need to research. I can think of a lot of ways to use this but I'm sure the best practices around its use are more nuanced than just the technical documentation.

Anyway, in terms of my immediate problem, not sure if that will fix it. I should have mentioned that in addition to the message about Javascript, the noscript tag also contains site content, including navigation links, that are not on the page otherwise for non-javascript clients. In other words, this entire website is a singe blank page with no content on it if you do not have javascript without the noscript tags. The long term solution is to completely redo the website, obviously, but I need a short term solution to get some SEO traction. I guess I could always put the javascript message as an image.

[john4math]

Can you try wrapping only the message about Javascript with the googleoff/googleon comments, and see what happens?  It you don't have to put it around everything in the

<noscript>. I would agree that it sounds like the structure of your site is not ideal, but I'd try that first and see if it solves the problem.</p></noscript>

[Everett]

John,

The googleoff and googleon tags are meant for Google's enterprise site search product, Google Search Appliance. They "shouldn't" have any effect on the public index. Do you have an example where you can prove they work in Google search?

[IrvCo_Interactive]

Yes actually you are correct. After I read this answer I tested it on my personal site by adding the tags around some nonsense words. Not only did Google index the pages with the nonsense words making it into their cache of the pages, but my site ranks for those nonsense words. So while it would be awesome if Googlebot honored those tags, they only work for the Google search appliance!

[john4math]

Weird. We were having a problem where lots of our skill pages were getting our

<noscript>text used as page descriptions on Google SERPS.  We added these comments, and Googlebot reverted to using our meta description as the page descriptions in SERPs.  It could have been a freak coincidence that Google stopped using our <noscript> text right after we implemented the tags, or possibly Google was (possibly accidentally) supporting them for web search awhile back when we originally did this, and now has stopped supporting it.  Anyways, our SERPS remain clean of our <noscript> text today (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.ixl.com/math/grade-5" target="_blank">example</a>).</p> <p>John Mueller recently commented on that Quora thread saying it won't do anything for web search, so IMO that puts this to rest.</p></noscript>