High charts, anyone used them? SEO impact/things to take into consideration

[Brian_Dowd]

Hi there Moz Community,

Our org is looking into implementing Highcharts, interactive charts on our website instead of having regular static chart images. I found this post recently about how Moz implemented them a while back, a couple years ago.

https://moz.com/community/q/question-for-moz-developers-highcharts

Moz made a pretty good case for them over alternatives. They would certainly keep people on the page longer, which is good, but is there anything else that I should take into account or think of before going ahead with this from an SEO perspective? Does anyone else have experience with them on their websites?

Thanks

[jon.white]

Hello! We use highcharts extensively in most of our apps and are pretty happy.  Our UI devs have built some very slick looking visualizations using it.  My personal favorite is attached.

Since all of our in-app charts are only available to logged-in users we don't have to consider SEO implications.  However Mozcast does (http://mozcast.com/), so Dr. Pete might have some insight.  I will ask him to respond here!

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[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, the main MozCast graphs use them, and those are public. Google seems to index the pages fine and even is parsing a lot of the text content on the graph itself, best I can tell. I haven't seen any SEO issues at this point.

I think I'd be wary of putting any really critical content (to search) entirely in a HighChart. You might want to break it out. If a page is nothing but a chart, it's kind of like a page that's nothing but a video embed. It still has value, potentially, but if you had a lot of them it could start to look thin and bots might not see all of that rich content.

That said, the HighChart is a pretty heavy element of the MozCast home-page, and it seems to rank fine. I'd really just start to worry if you had 100s of pages that were each a different chart but had very little supporting content.

The other issues are technical. Load-times are good with HighCharts, but mobile rendering can vary a bit. It's decent, but there are variations. If you have a big mobile audience, I'd definitely make sure things look the way you think and are accessible. If you had a very low tech-savvy audience that had JS turned off, obviously that's a consideration, too. I think that's rarely a fear these days, though.

[Brian_Dowd]

Hi There Jon and Dr. Pete,

Thanks for the answers. Much appreciated.

The only issue I was envisioning was Google's indexing of the highcharts. I imagined that since they are JS based, Google wouldn't be able to read and index them the way they are able to now with our regular image charts, but we are prepared to sacrifice that for a better UX with the interactive high charts. Luckily, as you touched on Pete, we have some accompanying text with each chart, so they won't be just pages with charts and little other content.

It is good that load times are ok, I hadn't actually thought about that. Our site speed is fairly fast, so most likely introducing HighCharts won't be a big issue even if they were to slow things down a bit.

Thanks for answers!

[Dr-Pete]

Looking at what's cached and appearing in search snippets, it seems like Google is crawling at least some of the text in my HighCharts on MozCast.com. Those charts aren't text heavy, so it's hard to tell how they weight it or if that text is eligible for ranking, but I strong suspect that Google is at least aware of HighCharts and can parse some of the data.