The main navigation is using JS, will this have a negative impact on SEO?

[Ty1986]

Hi mozzers,

We just redesigned our homepage and discovered that our main nav is using JS and when disabling JS, no main nav links was showing up. Is this still considered bad practice for SEO? https://cl.ly/14ccf2509478

thanks

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi There,

JS rendered UI isn't negative, it is however not a good practice also.

You can find complete information to the concept of JS rendered pages and UI on this link, https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/javascript-bad-for-seo.htm .

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Vijay

[jasongmcmahon]

The only bad SEO Practice regarding JS that I've of is trying to hide the JS files from Search Engines, apparently, Google needs to render a whole page as it indexing it; so blocking any JS (& CSS for that matter) isn't a good thing.

[josellamazares]

Googlebot does not render JavaScript
We hear very often about JavaScript rendering is the assumption that the crawler is responsible for the rendering. But that's not the case. The rendering is done by the indexer (from Google Caffeine).

More specifically, the Web Rendering Service (WRS), which is part of Google Caffeine. And this is exactly where the second great difficulty lies in the area of JavaScript SEO.

Gary Illyes says: "Also, to clarify, WRS is a subsystem of Caffeine, just like the PageRanker (cos yes, we still use it) or the canonicalization algorithm."

The process flow between the crawler and the indexer:

HTML files are downloaded.
CSS and JavaScript data will be downloaded in parallel.
WRS (Web Rendering Service) (part of Google Caffeine) is used to run JS.
WRS renders all files.
Now Google Caffeine can index the content if necessary.
And that's when Googlebot can crawl new links.
Why is that a problem? For the crawler to be able to enter the content and follow the links, it must first pass the data to the indexer. The indexer renders the content and returns it to the crawlers. Only now can the crawler see the content and follow the links. On the next page, the game starts again. Page by page. (many processes)

Unlike conventional pages, where the crawler crawls numerous pages and, after crawling, passes everything collectively to the indexer. (few processes)

This process presents another challenge to search engines.

Regards

[Ty1986]

Thanks Jose!