Hide messenger for crawlers
-
At Magnet.me we are using Intercom to communicate with our users. This means that we are actively adding javascript code which will load the Intercom javascript on each page, and render the button afterwards.
However, this button has no value for crawlers, and slows the page down as the javascript is big and fairly slow. Therefore I considered to ship some code which disables this button, such that performance would improve. To give a ball pack estimate, the buttons javascript is around 3x bigger than the actual entire react application...
Unfortunately this would result in giving users and crawlers slightly different content on the page. I'm unsure about the possible SEO impact:
- Would Google mark the page as faster due to less resources to load?
- Or would it penalize the page for showing slightly different content to users and search engines?
-
In general, I don't think that this is a great idea. Although Google does meter out crawl-allowance, Google also wants a realistic view of the pages which it is crawling. Your attempt at easing the burden of Google's crawl-bots may be seen as an attempt to 'fake' good page-speed metrics, for example (by letting Google load the web-page much faster than end users). This could cause some issues with your rankings if uncovered by a 'dumb' algorithm (which won't factor in your good intentions)
Your efforts may also be unrequired. Although Google 'can' fire and crawl JavaScript generated elements, it doesn't always do so and it doesn't do that for everyone. If you read my (main) response to this question, you'll get a much better idea of what I'm talking about here. As such, the majority of the time - you may be taking on 'potential' risk for no reward
Would it be possible to code things slightly differently? Currently you state that this is your approach:
"This means that we are actively adding javascript code which will load the Intercom javascript on each page, and render the button afterwards"
Could you not add the button through HTML / CSS, and bind a smaller script to the button which then loads the "Intercom javascript"? I am assuming here that the "Intercom javascript" is the large script which is slowing the page(s) down. Why not load that script, only on request (seems logical, but also admit I am no dev - sorry)? It just seems as though more things are being initiated and loaded up-front than are really required
Google want to know which technologies are deployed on your page if they choose to look, they also don't want people going around faking higher page-speed loading scores
If you really want to stop Google wasting time on that script, your basic options would be:
- Code the site to refuse to serve the script to the "googlebot" user agent
- Block the script in robots.txt so that it is never crawled (directive only)
The first option is a little thermonuclear and may mean you get accused of cloaking (unlikely), or at the least 'faking' higher page-speed scores (more likely). The second option is only a directive which Google can disregard, so the risks are lower. The down-side is that Google will pick up on the blocked resource, and may not elevate your page-loading speed. Even if they do, they may say "since we can't view this script or know what it does, we don't know what the implication for end-users is so we'll dampen the rankings a little as a risk assessment factor"
Myself, I would look for an implementation that doesn't slow the site down so much (for users or search-bots). I get that it may be tricky, obviously re-coding the JS from Intercom would probably break the chat entirely. Maybe though, you could think about when that script has to be loaded. Is it really needed, on page-load, all the time for everyone? Or do people only need that functionality, when they choose to interact? How can you slot the loading of the code into that narrow trench, and get the best of both worlds?
Sorry it's not a super simple answer, hope it helps
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
-
Critical crawler errors...4xx
Hey fam, I ran the Critical Crawler Issues and found 9 pages with critical crawler issues. I'm running a wordpress site and looked in the dashboard for Pages and Posts but the links aren't in the dashboard. Can you help fix? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Myflgreen0 -
Hiding h1 tags in Magento
Hi Moz Community, I know that hiding h1 tags isn't a good practice for SEO and google, but we have banners that look much nicer than the stock text Magento uses for its titles. The banners have the same text and the h1 is in the source code, just not visible on front end. The option Magento gives is "hide title on the page." So I'm not sure if this is actually the bad way to hide it or if it's fine for search engines. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Why is it the crawler saying I have 9 Duplicate Page Titles?
Hi, I received my weekly web crawl and it is saying this: | 4 | Duplicate Page Content |
Technical SEO | | afrohairsolutions
| 22 | Missing Meta Description Tag |
| 9 | Duplicate Page Title |
| 1 | Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) |
| 1 | Title Element Too Short |
| 1 | 301 (Permanent Redirect) | I'm new to SEO and don't know how to fix this, I don't really see how I have Duplicate Page Content or Duplicate Page Title. This is my website: afrohairsolutions.co.uk Thank you in advance.0 -
Will a google map loaded "on scroll" be ignored by the crawler?
One of my pages has two Google maps on it. This leads to a fairly high keyword density for words like "data", "map data" etc. Since one of the maps is basically at the bottom of the page I thought of loading it "on scroll" as soon as its container becomes visible (before loading the map div should be empty). Will the map then still be craweld by google (can they execute the JS in a way that the map is loaded anyways?) or would this help to reduce the keywords introduced by the maps?
Technical SEO | | ddspg0 -
SEOMoz Crawler vs Googlebot Question
I read somewhere that SEOMoz’s crawler marks a page in its Crawl Diagnostics as duplicate content if it doesn’t have more than 5% unique content.(I can’t find that statistic anywhere on SEOMoz to confirm though). We are an eCommerce site, so many of our pages share the same sidebar, header, and footer links. The pages flagged by SEOMoz as duplicates have these same links, but they have unique URLs and category names. Because they’re not actual duplicates of each other, canonical tags aren’t the answer. Also because inventory might automatically come back in stock, we can’t use 301 redirects on these “duplicate” pages. It seems like it’s the sidebar, header, and footer links that are what’s causing these pages to be flagged as duplicates. Does the SEOMoz crawler mimic the way Googlebot works? Also, is Googlebot smart enough not to count the sidebar and header/footer links when looking for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | ElDude0 -
What does the Google Crawler see when crawling this page?
If you look at this page http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/61/185/730/Batteries. You will see we have a vehicle filter on it. Right now you only see a picture of a battery and some bad text that needs to be updated ( We just hired a copywriter!). Our question is when google crawls this site will thy just see this or will they see all the products that appear after you pick a "machine type" "make" "model" and "year" Any help would be great. Right now we think it just sees this main page how we have set things up; however, we know that the crawler is also crawling some ajax. We just want to be sure of things.
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Slash at end of URL causing Google crawler problems
Hello, We are having some problems with a few of our pages being crawled by Google and it looks like the slash at the end of the URL is causing the problem. Would appreciate any pointers on this. We have a redirect in place that redirects the "no slash" URL to the "slash" URL for all pages. The obvious solution would be to try turning this off, however, we're unable to figure our where this redirect is coming from. There doesn't appear to be an instruction in our .htaccess file doing this, and we've also tried using "DirectorySlash Off" in the .htaccess file, but that doesn't work either. (if it makes a difference it is a 302 redirect doing this, not a 301) If we can't get the above to work, then the other solution would be to somehow reconfigure the page so that it is recognizable with the slash at the end by Google. However, we're not sure how this would be done. I think the quickest solution would be to turn off the "add slash" redirect. Any ideas on where this command might be hiding, and how to turn it off would be greatly appreciated. Or any tips from people who have had similar crawl problems with google and any workarounds would be great! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onetwentysix0 -
Hiding text with Javascript and a more button
I am considering putting a block of text on may pages, that initially appears as a snippet with a 'show more' button that expands to show the whole lot. Question: If the search engines can see the whole lot, but the visitor only sees the snippet until they click 'show more' then is this cloaking? Is it a really bad idea? Or can I get away with it because I am not being deceptive just improving the design? Help!
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0