Question on noscript tags and indexing
-
If I have a
<noscript>tag on every page of my website with the same sentence over and over saying something to the effect of "Sorry our site uses Javascript, please enable javascript for the full site experience.", Webmaster Tools will tell me that one of the most common words on my site is "Javascript".</p> <p>Is this something to be concerned about from an SEO perspective? My site is obviously not about Javascript and I don't want to dilute my page's topic or authority by repeating words that are not relevant to the topic of my site.</p> <p>Thanks!</p></noscript>
-
Weird. We were having a problem where lots of our skill pages were getting our
<noscript>text used as page descriptions on Google SERPS. We added these comments, and Googlebot reverted to using our meta description as the page descriptions in SERPs. It could have been a freak coincidence that Google stopped using our <noscript> text right after we implemented the tags, or possibly Google was (possibly accidentally) supporting them for web search awhile back when we originally did this, and now has stopped supporting it. Anyways, our SERPS remain clean of our <noscript> text today (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.ixl.com/math/grade-5" target="_blank">example</a>).</p> <p>John Mueller recently commented on that Quora thread saying it won't do anything for web search, so IMO that puts this to rest.</p></noscript>
-
Yes actually you are correct. After I read this answer I tested it on my personal site by adding the tags around some nonsense words. Not only did Google index the pages with the nonsense words making it into their cache of the pages, but my site ranks for those nonsense words. So while it would be awesome if Googlebot honored those tags, they only work for the Google search appliance!
-
John,
The googleoff and googleon tags are meant for Google's enterprise site search product, Google Search Appliance. They "shouldn't" have any effect on the public index. Do you have an example where you can prove they work in Google search?
-
Can you try wrapping only the message about Javascript with the googleoff/googleon comments, and see what happens? It you don't have to put it around everything in the
<noscript>. I would agree that it sounds like the structure of your site is not ideal, but I'd try that first and see if it solves the problem.</p></noscript>
-
John,
You just literally blew my mind with that googleon/googleoff documentation! I've been working as an SEO since 2001 and have literally never heard of this! I have so many questions I need to research. I can think of a lot of ways to use this but I'm sure the best practices around its use are more nuanced than just the technical documentation.
Anyway, in terms of my immediate problem, not sure if that will fix it. I should have mentioned that in addition to the message about Javascript, the noscript tag also contains site content, including navigation links, that are not on the page otherwise for non-javascript clients. In other words, this entire website is a singe blank page with no content on it if you do not have javascript without the noscript tags. The long term solution is to completely redo the website, obviously, but I need a short term solution to get some SEO traction. I guess I could always put the javascript message as an image.
-
I had a similar problem, Google was picking up
<noscript>text and using it as the description for our pages in some SERPs. We didn't want to remove them, so we tried using "googleoff" and "googleon" tags, which are just HTML comments that Googlebot can read. You can read their documentation <a href="https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/68/admin_crawl/Preparing#pagepart" target="_blank">here</a>. We wrapped the text in the <noscript> with these comments, and it worked like a charm, so it does look like Google respects these tags.</p> <p>If I were you, I'd go ahead and add the syntax if it's easy for you to do (i.e. only have to add it a few places in the code, not in thousands). It's probably not great for your SEO that Google thinks your site is about Javascript. Or you can do what Frederico says and remove it. Only you know your user base, but he's probably right. Almost everyone for the most part everyone has Javascript enabled these days.</p> <p>I originally read about this in the Quora thread <a href="http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-hasnt-Google-banned-Quora-for-hiding-answers-from-search-engine-visitors" target="_blank">here</a>. Quora Uses it to control what text Googlebot can index on their pages. If you want to see an example of it on my site, you can view one of our skills <a href="http://www.ixl.com/math/pre-k/identify-circles-squares-and-triangles" target="_blank">here</a>.</p></noscript>
-
Most modern browsers run javascript, and most users have Javascript enabled and running as sites today use it more and more. I would definitely remove that noscript tag and all within. It is actually not adding any value while it can cause google to recognize your site as something related to javascript.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Question on canonicals
hi community let's say i have to 2 e-commerce sites selling the same English books in different currencies - one of the site serves the UK market ( users can purchase in sterling) while another one European markets ( user can purchase in euro). Sites are identical. SEO wise, while the "European" site homepage has a good ranking across major search engines in europe, product pages do not rank very well at all. Since site is a .com too it s hard to push it in local search engines. I would like then to push one of the sites across all search engines,tackling duplicate content etc.Geotargeting would make the rest. I would like to add canonicals tag pointing at the UK version across all EU site product pages, while leaving the EU homepage rank. I have 2 doubts though: is it ok to have canonical tags pointing at an external site. is it ok to have part of a site with canonical tags, while other parts are left ranking?
Technical SEO | | Mrlocicero0 -
Google not indexing my website
Hi guys, We have this website http://www.m-health-expo.nl/ but it is not indexed by google. In webmaster tools google says that it can not fetch the site due to the robots.txt but i do not see any faults in it. http://www.m-health-expo.nl/robots.txt Do you see something strange, it really bothers me.
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Single URL not indexed
Hi everyone! Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index. We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links. The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed. Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Which factors are effect on Google index?
Mywebsite have 455 URL submitedbut only 77 URLs are indexed. How can i improve more indexed URL?
Technical SEO | | magician0 -
Does Google index has expiration?
Hi, I have this in mind and I think you can help me. Suppose that I have a pagin something like this: www.mysite.com/politics where I have a list of the current month news. Great, everytime the bot check this url, index the links that are there. What happens next month, all that link are not visible anymore by the user unless he search in a search box or google. Does google keep those links? The current month google check that those links are there, but next month are not, but they are alive. So, my question is, Does google keep this links for ever if they are alive but nowhere in the site (the bot not find them anymore but they work)? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Tags - what keywords should i add ?
Hello 🙂 When I am adding tags to my post, what keywords should i use for tags and how many tags i should add per post ? Should i use keywords from title of post , focus keyword or something related to post ? my blog is http://www.dota2club.com/ Thank you !!!!
Technical SEO | | wolfinjo0 -
Img before or after h1 tag?
I like images to align right at top of content page. img tag before h1 tag looks better on page, but wondering if h1 tag before img tag is preferred by spider. Irrelevant? or possibly matters? thanks for any thoughts.
Technical SEO | | jotham2
All about Stuff or All about Stuff or even
All about Stuff0 -
Weird Indexing Question
Google has indexed mysite.com/ and mysitem.com/\/ (no idea why). If you click on the /%5C? URL it takes you to mysite.com//. I have a rel=canonical tag on it that goes to mysite.com/ but I was wondering if there was another way to correct the issue.
Technical SEO | | BryanPhelps-BigLeapWeb0