In the first installment of a new web series, Google’s Martin Splitt explains how the search engine indexes JavaScript sites.
Splitt’s new web series focuses on SEO and JavaScript and is accessible on the official Google Webmasters channel.
The first video dives into the essentials by covering the most fundamental aspect of JavaScript and SEO—how JavaScript gets indexed initially.
Splitt mentions that the series will eventually explore more complex topics, although revisiting the basics can be beneficial.
Here are some highlights from the video.
### How Google Indexes JavaScript Sites
When Google crawls JavaScript, there’s an extra stage required that regular HTML content does not have to go through.
This additional stage is called the rendering stage, which doesn’t always occur immediately.
The indexing stage and rendering stage are separate, allowing Google to index the non-JavaScript content as quickly as possible.
Google’s crawler will return sometime after the initial indexing to add the JavaScript content.
For site owners, this means that JavaScript content will take longer to be indexed.
Splitt frequently mentions that JavaScript is resource-intensive for Google to crawl and index because it needs to be downloaded, parsed, and executed.
If you’re interested in learning how to make JavaScript content more Google-friendly, stay tuned for future episodes.
### Future Episodes on JavaScript & SEO
Martin Splitt outlines that future episodes of this new series will cover:
– Getting JavaScript content indexed quickly
– Handling other crawlers and social media agents gracefully
– Making JavaScript sites work well with Google Search
– Answering common questions about JavaScript & SEO
– Tools that can assist the SEO of JavaScript content
It seems there’s quite a bit of content planned for this series, and I’ll definitely be following it closely.
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