JavaScript is a very powerful web language and is used by virtually every website you view in some shape or form. There are infinite ways JavaScript can be used, from simple scripts like showing a clock to complex scripts like AJAX searching, page updating and even small games, etc.
Unfortunately there is a downside to using JavaScript on your website; Google and all of the other search engines can’t read it. The most they will read from JavaScript is anything inside a document.write() tag, but even that is not guaranteed. The reason behind this is it normally requires a web browser to parse the code and output its results, but the robots are already very sophisticated and adding such functionality would prove quite difficult.
Some things are OK to use JavaScript with however, here is a short list:
- Clock/Date Display
- Analytics Codes (search engine robots don’t need to trigger these, doing so might produce false data)
- Text Editor Boxes (as these don’t need indexing)
- … Plus anything else that doesn’t need indexing.
The things you shouldn’t use JavaScript on are:
- Content
- Navigation Menus (you can make CSS menus very easily)
- Tab Systems (unless the content is always displayed in the source)
- Linking
- … Plus anything else you want indexing.
So to summarise, anything you want to be indexed and available to search for in the search engines you should not create using JavaScript. Anything you don’t care about getting indexed, you can feel free to use JavaScript.
You should continue to bear in mind that search engines are getting smarter every day and soon they might pick up on this JavaScript, but until that time you should give the robots the best chance possible at indexing your content by making it available on the page as normal text.
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Posted by Andy.
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