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 About Thin Content
Hello, We have an encyclopedia type page on our e-commerce site. Basically, it's a page with a list of terms related to our niche, product definitions, slang terms, etc. The terms on the encyclopedia page are each linked to their own page that contains the term and a very short definition (about 1-2 sentences). The purpose of these is to link them on product pages if a product has a feature or function that may be new to our customers. We have about 82 of these pages. Are these pages more likely to help us because they're providing information to visitors, or are they likely to hurt us because of the very small amount of content on each page? Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | mostcg0 -
I Lost Index Status of My Sitemap
We have a simple WordPress website for our law firm, with an English version and a Spanish version. I have created a sitemap (with appropriate language markup in the XML file) and submitted it to Webmaster Tools. Google crawled the site and accepted the sitemap last week, 24/24 pages indexed, 12 English and 12 Spanish. This week, Google decided to remove one of the pages from the index, showing 23/24 pages indexed. So, my questions are as follows: How can I find out which page was dropped from the index? If the pages are the same content, but different language, why did only one version of the page get dropped, while the other version remains? Why did the Big G drop one of my pages from the index? How can I reindex the dropped page? I know this is a fairly basic issue, and I'm embarrassed for asking, but I sure do appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | RLG0 -
Title Keyword Order Question
Hey there, Hoping someone could provide me with an answer / some insight into this. As an example, if I were to be targeting "Fish markets in" and "Fish shops in" as my keyword(s). And my site name was "The Fish Guide". I am trying to populate my title tags as best as possible without sacrificing readability and definitely making an effort to avoid the the spam-factor. Ideally I'd like to rank well (just focusing on titles at the moment, nothing else) when a user searches for "Fish markets in London" and **"Fish shops in London" **or "Fish markets in Los Angeles" or "Fish shops in Berlin" etc. If I were to use the following structure in my titles (in this case for London): "Fish markets and fish shops in London - The Fish Guide" Would this work as I hope? I.E. If a user searched for either "Fish shops in London" or "Fish markets in London" would the format of my title in this example work or would I need to have "Fish Markets in London" and "Fish Shops in London" grouped together? E.G. "Fish Markets in London - Fish Shops in London - The Fish Guide" Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Gorkonola0 -
What to do with 302 redirects being indexed
Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/ (there is no content here, and never has been). This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting. Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable. But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way? I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | etruvian0 -
Robots.txt Question
In the past, I had blocked a section of my site (i.e. domain.com/store/) by placing the following in my robots.txt file: "Disallow: /store/" Now, I would like the store to be indexed and included in the search results. I have removed the "Disallow: /store/" from the robots.txt file, but approximately one week later a Google search for the URL produces the following meta description in the search results: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more" Is there anything else I need to do to speed up the process of getting this section of the site indexed?
Technical SEO | | davidangotti0 -
Duplicate title tags and meta description tags
According to GWT, it seems that some of the pages on my website have duplicate title and meta tags. The pages identified by Google are nothing but dynamic pages: http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=1
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=2 The thing is that I do use the canonical link tag on all pages. Should I also use the "robots noindex" tag when the page is invoked using a GET parameter? Again sorry for my english. Thank you, Stephane1 -
Pages not indexed by Google
We recently deleted all the nofollow values on our website. (2 weeks ago) The number of pages indexed by google is the same as before? Do you have explanations for this? website : www.probikeshop.fr
Technical SEO | | Probikeshop0 -
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