Javascript to fetch page title for every webpage, is it good?

[SmartStartMediacom]

We have a zend framework that is complex to program if you ask me, and since we have 20k+ pages that we need to get proper titles to and meta descriptions, i need to ask if we use Javascript to handle page titles (basically the previously programming team had NOT set page titles at all) and i need to get proper page titles from a h1 tag within the page.

current course of action which we can easily implement is fetch page title from that h1 tag being used throughout all pages with the help of javascript, But this does makes it difficult for engines to actually read what's the page title? since its being fetched with javascript code that we have put in, though i had doubts, is anyone one of you have simiilar situation before? if yes i need some help!

Update: I tried the JavaScript way and here is what it looks like http://islamicencyclopedia.org/public/index/hadith/id/1/book_id/106  i know the fact that google won't read JavaScript like the way we have done with the website, But i need help on "How we can work around this issue"  Knowing we don't have other options.

[DanielMulderNL]

Hi... I would not prefer a client side approach to this. If it's readable depends on the script itself. Although some JS fans will say this alright I would prefer to do this server side with php, or similar, and make a template that does this rewrite. It's not to hard. Or why not a batch run to modify all pages once to hardcode the correct title in the page? Have some scripts that can do this for you if you would like.

Hope this helps.

[SmartStartMediacom]

Thank you Daniel for the input, Since the code is all messed up and i can't convince the Board to redo the site from scratch. i'll have to go with small tricks with title tags and descriptions to be set, with JavaScript as i just tried, it worked and it now does fetch all the titles and displays them on the browser title, without any significant change in the actual code except for the addition of JavaScript that i just tried.

But i did a test run with Rich snippet testing tool to see what Google pulls in as preview for search results, and it didn't show anything, No title and No description .. alas! So i guess it does mean using JavaScript to fetch title & description won't help? I'm still not sure.

So now the real question i have in mind; Does this Javascript technique that we just used, will it be of any good SEO wise or will have any value?

[Er_Maqui]

Any javascript effor is invalid for SEO. Google doesn't read them.

You can try to make it on PHP, it's not complex, search your an replace with meta desc=$var and <title>$var2 (and, also, </head>). Then you can set the meta desc and page title with a variable in your code, and then this effor effectively have SEO value, because when the search engine fetch the page they have title and desc.</p> <p>Maybe this is more work than JS form, but also it's better for SEO and web itself (The JS run takes time on client side).</p></title>

[David-Kley]

Google can read Javascript, but only certain types and implemetations. Is there a way you can set this swap out to happen on the database or server side? That might be the best way to get the live text readable, as most likely the javascript is being rendered and displayed after the initial crawl of the page. Even if it is a milisecond later, Google might not allow/catch it.

[DanielMulderNL]

Your welcome. Interesting question. My answer is that if the HTML TITLE is set with client side JavaScript then it's has little change of being picked up as the title by crawlers or Google. Let's say we alter the node element Title value with like this:

In this case it will alter the value after the hard coded HTML title was send to the browser. It would need the crawler to load the document in full and read the HTML title value only after fully rendering it as if it where a human user. This is not likely.

Then we could also try a document write to construct the HTML HEAD tag Title as a string to use for the browser as the title like this:

Will not work as the title text is not actually altered after evaluation of the script line.

This does not work because the title is not set but because it's not actually printed to the browser as a string. The source code for the title still looks like this in to any browser:

As you can see the script does not print the result string of the evaluation to the browser but still sets the value of the document object model node HTML TITLE to the value it evaluates to.

Try it for yourself with this dummy page I made just to be certain.
http://www.googlewiki.nl/test/seojavascripttest2.html And this is the DOM info for this page http://www.googlewiki.nl/seo-checker/testanchor.php?url=http://www.googlewiki.nl/test/seojavascripttest2.html&anchor=test

Or am I missing something here?

Hope this helps.