What is the best format for animated content

[remkoallertz]

We want to use some movement in our designs, charts etc. what format is the most SEO friendly?

[MikeTek]

Hi Remko,

Apologies for the slow response here - the alert system that lets us know a question has gone unanswered broke down for a time.

The short answer: the ideal is to render the content/information as raw HTML, then use a JS library (whatever suits the animation or chart style you're after) to visualize and add animations.

Animations handled with jQuery, for example, won't be processed/"viewed" by Google, so if you're using such a library to add polish to your content, it's best that the page "degrades gracefully" - so that without JS support, the key content/information is still there in the HTML source.

While Google has made strides in their ability to render and index content delivered via JS resources, it is computationally expensive and we have seen that relying too heavily on JS to render the content itself is sub-optimal.

If you're following the above, any modern and widely-adopted JS animation/chart-building library should be fine.

Hope this helps,
Mike