back
1 comments
Just because GoogleBot can crawl and execute/index javascript, doesn't mean that it will on your site. The best bet would be to keep them. Or take them off and see what happens. If you don't see negative effects, then you will have discovered something interesting.
We sure saw a hell of a lot of improvement when we moved a lot of client-side rendering to the server. Before that, Google wasn't indexing any of our content that was rendered in JS.

We know googlebot executes JS. But this could be primarily for things like validating that a site isn't cheating by dynamically hiding search keywords and so on. It is also for generating the page preview.

It's good to see that they're starting to index JS-rendered content too, as seen with the Facebook comments widget, but it does not mean we're free to ignore these issues just yet. As it stands, client-side rendering in general means a huge hit to search ranking and experience (e.g. your search results won't have anything meaningful to say, and will probably use irrelevant text like your static footer/copyright notice as the description).

Yeah I'd definitely say we should continue to follow our established best practices until G gets better at this but Josh's evidence and our continued testing on this subject is very compelling.
I'd argue that best practice in web development is not requiring JavaScript to load a page, but I'm sure that issue has been done to death in the past.
I agree on this one... just because Google CAN do it doesn't mean they will.

On that note, I am personally of the belief that the fragments are part of Google's learning/training process for their spiders.

If they sniff the XHR traffic on every domain they encounter a HashBang they can learn lots about the use of AJAX and the types of content being exposed via AJAX.