Can Googlebot crawl the content on this page?

[danatanseo]

Hi all,

I've read the posts in Google about Ajax and javascript (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en) and also this post: http://moz.com/ugc/can-google-really-access-content-in-javascript-really.

I am trying to evaluate if the content on this page, http://www.vwarcher.com/CustomerReviews, is crawlable by Googlebot? It appears not to be. I perused the sitemap and don't see any ugly Ajax URLs included as Google suggests doing. Also, the page is definitely indexed, but appears the content is only indexed via its original source (Yahoo!, Citysearch, Google+, etc.).

I understand why they are using this dynamic content, because it looks nice to an end-user and requires little to no maintenance. But, is it providing them any SEO benefit? It appears to me that it would be far better to take these reviews and simply build them into HTML.

Thoughts?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Google appears to have the page cached, so I would say there are no real issues.

Just do a cache:http://www.vwarcher.com/CustomerReviews and you can see what Google currently has.

-Andy

[danatanseo]

Hah! Thanks Andy. Must not have had enough coffee this morning. I didn't even think of looking at the cache...so obvious, lol!  Thanks so much. You are spot on.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hehe no problem at all Dana. Glad to have helped stand in for your coffee

-Andy

[billhartzer]

Dana,

Yes, Google has indexed the page. However, if you view the source code of the page you won't see any text of the customer reviews. Even if you view the cached version, there is text there: but it's not necessarily text on the page. If you view the cached version, and then see the source code of the page, again, the content is not there. The reviews are not there in the source code.

Let's take this one step further. Search Google for one of the testimonials or a part of one: "Marc Palermo is a great customer service" which is NOT indexed in Google.

Google sees the source code but doesn't appear to be indexing the content.

[blasonde]

Bill is right.  The page is indexed and cached, however googlebot cannot read the reviews.  If you view the cache (cache:http://www.vwarcher.com/CustomerReviews) and then click "Text-only version" in the upper right, you'll see that those reviews are not there (google can't crawl them).

[danatanseo]

Thanks so much Bill and Brian. This is exactly what I was thinking. I did the same thing Bill suggested initially and took a snippet from one of the reviews and did a verbatim search and got nothing. What I thought this told me was that yes, the page was indexed, but not the content. The fact that the cached version renders the content from the javascript only shows that the script was executed, not necessarily that any of the content it contains was actually indexed.

From an SEO standpoint I think this is valuable content that the dealer would very much want indexed. While the service providing the javascript might be very convenient, and the majority of end users might be able to consume the content, the fact that it's not searchable, to me, means it's an opportunity lost.

Thanks again everyone.