Does Google read code as is or as rendered?

[jhinchcliffe]

Question - Does Google read code as is or as rendered?

So for example, with a Facebook Like box, it has all the profile pictures of people...will Google see these as all separate links or ignore them?

[gfiorelli1]

Probably it sees them, but remember what happen when Google try to cache a Facebook Page or Profile: this is the cache of the Facebook page of Moz:

1. Google see it rendered;
2. But the text only version sends to the Facebook Page itself not to the only-text version of it. That's the visualization of the FB Walled Garden.

Hence, if it can create association between links shared and the profile sharing it, that must be not using the link graph but co-occurences IMHO.

[Anti-Alex]

ThompsonPaul has a good suggestion which is test your pages with "Fetch as Googlebot" to see what they see.

Short answer to your question is no. Google will not pay attention the Facebook Like Box pictures because the codes comes up as javascript (raw code). Whether Google sees it or not is really dependent on how the source is written. For the Facebook Like/Group box, Google won't count them as individual links on a page and see it as one javascript widget.

[Doc_Sheldon]

Hi, Stephanie-

Googlebots read as raw code. But in the example you give, it would see those links, as well. What remains as a question is whether it recognizes the nature of those links and therefore pays them limited attention. Personally, I doubt Google ignores them, as it's a valuable source of data for them for both the link graph and the Knowledge Graph.

[ThompsonPaul]

In pretty well all cases, the crawlers crawl code only, Stephanie. It would be too computationally expensive (both for your server and theirs) for them to render every page before crawling it.

The Fetch as Googlebot tool in your Google Webmaster Tools account will show you exactly what the Google crawler sees. When you us the Fetch tool, the result will show a line indicating the success of the fetch. The word Success (in green) is actually a link to a view of the page exactly as Google see it.

That make sense?

Paul