SEO experts at The WebMarketing Group have recently seen an instance where Google has, it would appear, read JavaScript – something which has long been understood to be unfeasible. However, could this be the sign that Google is changing and adapting to interactive features that websites have? Many SEO gurus have suggested that Google is now advanced enough to understand URLs from JavaScript code, and this would be welcomed news if it was true.
SEO works around the basic premise of understanding Google’s algorithm, but it is often the Googlebot that gets overlooked. The Googlebot is what spiders every website, sifting out the relevant information and what it can understand. So, if it can now understand Javascript, this would be a huge advantage. Some say that since Google is constantly developing then it seems only natural that they would ensure the Googlebot has a basic understanding of JavaScript.
Here at The WebMarketing Group, one of our SEO Account Managers has seen first hand the suspected case of Google reading JavaScript. The main image on a client's Homepage had text in it, and this was being picked up by the Googlebot. This text was used once within the HTML code. However, since the image had 3 images it displayed on rotation, the text was being used 3 times and when the Homepage was cached as a read-only page, it was being displayed as 3 separate instances of text.
Since Google has previously only used what it could find in the HTML, we found this to be a curious discovery. It would certainly appear that Google has indexed the JavaScript and seen the text has been used 3 times, therefore looking like duplicate content.
So, in order to get round the duplicate content issue, we came up with the simple solution of making the text static in the HTML and then using JavaScript to display the images in the background.
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