Javascript and SEO

[nhhernandez]

I've done a bit of reading and I'm having difficulty grasping it. Can someone explain it to me in simple language?

What I've gotten so far:

• Javascript can block search engine bots from fully rendering your website.

• If bots are unable to render your website, it may not be able to see important content and discount these content from their index.

• To know if bots could render your site, check the following:

• Google Search Console Fetch and Render

• Turn off Javascript on your browser and see if there are any site elements shown or did some disappear

• Use an online tool Technical SEO Fetch and Render

• Screaming Frog's Rendered Page

• GTMetrix results: if it has a Defer parsing of Javascript as a recommendation, that means there are elements being blocked from rendering (???)

Using our own site as an example, I ran our site through all the tests listed above. Results:

• Google Search Console: Rendered only the header image and text. Anything below wasn't rendered. The resources googlebot couldn't reach include Google Ad Services, Facebook, Twitter, Our Call Tracker and Sumo. All "Low" or blank severity.
• Turn off Javascript: Shows only the logo and navigation menu. Anything below didn't render/appear.
• Technical SEO Fetch and Render: Our page rendered fully on Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile.
• Screaming Frog: The Rendered Page tab is blank. It says 'No Data'.
• GTMetrix Results: Defer parsing of JavaScript was recommended.

From all these results and across all the tools I used, how do I know what needs fixing? Some tests didn't render our site fully while some did. With varying results, I'm not sure where to from here.

[brettmandoes]

Hey Nikki, I think your specific question is more centered on "Will having a website that is only fully enabled with Javascript be harmful to SEO?"

First, there's a lot of mythology about this in SEO land. There are outdated resources and it looks like you've read some of them. Google has advanced their ability to crawl and understand js and the content behind it to a very advanced degree and the tools you may use as proxies to understand Google's capabilities aren't so effective.

But before I move on, I want to verify something with you. When you're talking about javascript, are you specifically looking for answers regarding a website like WIX, built with AJAX? Because that can change my answer significantly.

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[nhhernandez]

Hi Brett, thanks for your response, I've read a couple recently published articles, but this was the one that stood out - https://www.elephate.com/blog/ultimate-guide-javascript-seo/ and kinda alarmed me.

There is a part there that says: there is virtually no real life case of a client rendered JS website/brand/store ranking high. So I can’t guarantee that your JavaScript-rich website will rank as high as its HTML equivalent.

Our site was built on WordPress, but predominantly JavaScript. We have been really working a lot on on page content and link building the past 6 months, but we could not beat our competitors in the top 3 for the keyword 'seo brisbane'. The closest we've gotten was #6. We've been monitoring their sites as well and it looks like only 1 is doing active link building. The others seemed to be just cemented there.

We're looking at other reasons why we're not moving up and Javascript is one of them.

We have other sites we manage that are also experiencing slow progress. So you are right, my question is centered on how Javascript sites affect SEO and how to know if it's the culprit and how to fix.

Thanks!

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[brettmandoes]

Thanks for the response Nikki, I'll try to be as thoughtful about this as I can, but I am somewhat skeptical that your problem is javascript. It may be a contributing factor, but in general the concern that most SEOs would have with java is that Google can't crawl it and effectively the content rendered by java is invisible, making it completely impossible to rank as your page is deindexed, and yeah, this is a real risk. The fact that you're on page 1 right now for a competitive term though means that isn't likely your issue. And you're on a Wordpress site, so most of the js issues aren't going to be a problem for you, unless you're using an Angular integrated theme or something.

That doesn't mean there aren't any technical issues holding you back. I ran your page through a couple tools and I'm finding that the page is very heavy, slow to load, and has a very low performance score in terms of page load times and part of that is how js heavy your webpage is. I would recommend running your page through any of the free tools out there. The lighthouse extension for Chrome isn't great, but it was developed by Google so it gives you an idea how they might be measuring your page. Your page scored a performance rating of 4 out of 100, which again, big indication you have speed problems related to your js that could be tied to your rankings.

I think you're on the right track to investigate technical performance issues, but the easiest way to track this down is to start by making sure you don't have content that isn't being indexed. From there you should be able to see if there's any js that's blocking content from rendering for Googlebot. If Google is crawling and indexing the content, your js is okay from a visibility perspective and you can focus on the performance aspect.

If Google is displaying the page completely with fetch and render, you're probably okay, but try going into Chrome Dev Tools and disabling the cache, then reloading the page. Watch for any errors and try running lighthouse with that open. You'll probably be able to catch errors that way.

Good luck!

[nhhernandez]

Thanks so much for the very helpful insights and for running our website through tests, I appreciate it. I'll try running the site on lighthouse. I agree we do have speed issues that we need to solve. Our page is also not showing up at all with GSC fetch and render.

Also, I tried Googling our brand + content within the expanding tabs and some did not show up on the SERPs. All other content not in expanding tabs showed up. I know Google still reads and indexes tabbed content but treats it with less importance. But I guess, not all of it will get indexed.

Thanks again!

[nhhernandez]

Thanks! We probably should have combined JS with CSS and not built a site fully reliant on JS. This looks like what our competitors have done.