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
-
Pages not indexable?
Hello, I've been trying to find out why Google Search Console finds these pages non-indexable: https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/eat-drink.html https://www.visitflorida.com/en-us/florida-beaches/beach-finder.html Moz and SEMrush both crawl the pages and show no errors but GSC comes back with, "blocked by robots.txt" but I've confirmed it is not. Anyone have any thoughts? 6AYn1TL
Technical SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Same H1 & H2 Tags
Is it bad to have the same H1 & H2 tag on one page? I found a similar question here on the moz forum but it didn't exactly answer my question. And will adding "about" on the H2 help, or should we avoid duplicate tags completely? Here is a link to the page in question (which will repeat throughout this site.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Disavow questions
Pretty sure I know the answers to these but someone asked me to make absolutely sure so here goes, any opinions welcome: If i disavow a whole domain does it include all sub-domains on the domain also?- my answer is clearly yes. If i have network of links really bad linking to my website that are already nofollow but awful websites to be linked on, is it worth putting them in the disavow list anyway to basically tell Google literally no association? I know the whole point of disavow is to essentially nofollow the link. Opinions much appreciated, thank you guys.
Technical SEO | | tdigital0 -
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 -
An Easy Question - Backlinks
Hi guys, I know this is an easy question and I'm already quite sure of the answer for it but it would be good to get some other views. This website - http://www.collapso.net/ have 261,923 backlinks to our website according to Ahrefs. They have 1000's of pages like this - http://www.collapso.net/countiesnew/Cork.html which link to our site. 43.95% of the backlinks to our site are from these guys but we've been fortunate enough to never receive any warnings via WMT or ever experienced drop offs in traffic. My question is - Do we have this site remove all the links to our site or leave them alone? Given there's such a large quantity of links, I'm not exactly sure what the impact would be on us. My instinct says get rid of them. Although part of me questions what such a massive drop in our link profile would look like to Google.
Technical SEO | | MarkScully0 -
Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing
We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004. What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0 -
Meta tags - better NOT to have?
OK ok . . . the SEOMox report card told me it's actually better NOT to have meta tag keywords on my page, because my competitors can then look at my page to see what words I am trying to target . . . That makes since, but is also painfully counter intuitive. I thought I would just double check and make sure . .. NO META TAGS KEYWORDS? and if so . . .. what (if anything) should I have in the meta tags?
Technical SEO | | damon12120 -
Why Google did not index our domain?
Hi, We launched tmart 60 days ago and submitted to google, bing, yahoo 20 days later. But google had never indexed our website still when yahoo indexed it in one week. What we have checked or tried: 1. We got 20~50 inlinks in one month and now 81 inlinks via yahoo site explorer. 2. This domain has registered for 13 years and we purchased it from sedo last year. We
Technical SEO | | zt673
did not find any problems from domain archive pages. 3. Page similar: the homepage is 50% similar to one of our competitors when we just launched.
So we adjusted the page structure and modified the content one month later and decreased the similarity to 30% (by tools from webconfs.com) 4. Google Robots: googlebot crawled our website every day after we submitted for indexing.
We opened GWT account for it and added the xml sitemap last week. GWT said nothing
was wrong except the time of page loading. Our questions: Why google did not indexed our website? What should we do? Thanks, wu0