Main content - javascript/ajax
-
Hi,
On most of our pages Javascript is displaying our main content, so it doesn't show up on the page source and I assume isn't being crawled by Google to the best of its ability.
It's also not showing up on MOZ's page grader and crawl results, making analysis and testing harder.
What's the easiest way, without having to completely redo our website, to have this content crawled by search engines and moz?
-
Google's guide for AJAX crawling is here. This is a considerable amount of work though, and honestly I wouldn't recommend it. Google is getting better everyday at crawling JavaScript content. You can try to test whether it's indexing this content by doing some very specific Google searches for things only rendered by JavaScript, and seeing if your pages rank for those searches. If they do, there's a good chance that Google is reading and rendering your JavaScript properly. Even if they don't now, it's likely only a matter of time before they do.
I don't imagine that Rogerbot has an army of engineers at Moz trying to figure out how to render JavaScript outside of a browser, so I wouldn't expect this to come to Moz crawls anytime soon. I also doubt that Rogerbot would understand what's going on in Google's guide either, as I wouldn't expect many sites to have actually gone through this process.
Why is most of your main content generated by JavaScript? It sounds like you should be rendering some of this on the page in good ol fashioned HTML. A lot of times this doesn't require an entire redo of a website. It could just be a matter of loading some default HTML with the page, and then updating it with JavaScript, instead of rendering all of it with JavaScript. It would be easier to see if you share the site (if not, I understand).
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
-
Category Pages & Content
Hi Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Scraping / Duplicate Content Question
Hi All, I understanding the way to protect content such as a feature rich article is to create authorship by linking to your Google+ account. My Question
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
You have created a webpage that is informative but not worthy to be an article, hence no need create authorship in Google+
If a competitor comes along and steals this content word for word, something similar, creates their own Google+ page, can you be penalised? Is there any way to protect yourself without authorship and Google+? Regards Mark0 -
What keywords should my main page contain ?
Hello. I have a domain with scripts and components for websites, each product page is somehow different and contains different phrases and keywords, for example: a) Flash Photo Gallery
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adrianTNT
b) JavaScript Menu
c) Flash Menu
d) PHP Rating Script
e) PHP Poll script It's kind of clear for me how to optimize keywords on these pages individually, but what would be best content / terms / keywords to use on my main page and main page title and anchor text to my root domain? Should it be a mix of all these keywords mentioned above ? Or is it better to be a general term like "website scripts" ?0 -
Magento Duplicate Content Recovery
Hi, we switched platforms to Magento last year. Since then our SERPS rankings have declined considerably (no sudden drop on any Panda/Penguin date lines). After investigating, it appeared we neglected to No index, follow all our filter pages and our total indexed pages rose sevenfold in a matter of weeks. We have since fixed the no index issue and the pages indexed are now below what we had pre switch to Magento. We've seen some positive results in the last week. Any ideas when/if our rankings will return? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonnygeeuk0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Virtual Domains and Duplicate Content
So I work for an organization that uses virtual domains. Basically, we have all our sites on one domain and then these sites can also be shown at a different URL. Example: sub.agencysite.com/store sub.brandsite.com/store Now the problem comes up often when we move the site to a brand's URL versus hosting the site on our URL, we end up with duplicate content. Now for god knows what damn reason, I currently cannot get my dev team to implement 301's but they will implement 302's. (Dont ask) I also am left with not being able to change the robots.txt file for our site. They say if we allowed people to go in a change this stuff it would be too messy and somebody would accidentally block a site that was not supposed to be blocked on our domain. (We are apparently incapable toddlers) Now I have an old site, sub.agencysite.com/store ranking for my terms while the new site is not showing up. So I am left with this question: If I want to get the new site ranking what is the best methodology? I am thinking of doing a 1:1 mapping of all pages and set up 302 redirects from the old to the new and then making the canonical tags on the old to reflect the new. My only thing here is how will Google actually view this setup? I mean on one hand I am saying
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
"Hey, Googs, this is just a temp thing." and on the other I am saying "Hey, Googs, give all the weight to this page, got it? Graci!" So with my limited abilities, can anybody provide me a best case scenario?0 -
301 or 302 - www.yoursite.com/uk/content
If your website CMS forces you to redirect from the homepage should it be a 301 or 302 Example includes www.direct.gov.uk which 302's it My view is that it should be a 302 in this instance and almost all others should be a 301 - the reason for this is that you want the www.direct.gov.uk to be the "primary" and one that is displayed in Google, whereas for anything else you want the URL of the location. Yes I know that ideally you don't have any redirection at all...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxonnMedia0 -
WWW vs Non-WWW/Moving a site to a new CMS/Redirect all of the previous URLs
We are working on a new design for a website, which is currently on a CMS that has non-seo-friendly URLs. There is no redirection of 'www' to non-www or vice versa, or handling of homepage redirection so there is only one instance of 'home'. To move the site in the future, all of these URLs will have to be redirected to their new, and I hope, seo-friendly counterparts. Is it prudent now to redirect the four home page links so there is only one? and to redirect all non-www to 'www' so there is only one instance of each page? Or should I leave it and redirect all of them when the time comes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | haan_seo0