GoogleBot Can Execute JavaScript? Really - Yes, Really!

May 18, 2012 - 8:40 am 1 by

AJAXI love it when old news makes it to larger publications as breaking topics that no one covered before.

Ars Technica reports GoogleBot can now index and execute JavaScript and more content behind AJAX. This came from a post by the swapped.cc blog.

Google's Matt Cutts commented on this at a Hacker News thread saying "Google continues to work on better/smarter ways to crawl websites, including getting better at executing JavaScript to discover content."

Thing is, Google has been doing this for a while. Back in 2009 GoogleBot was executing JavaScript and in November 2011 Google began doing so with AJAX. Matt Cutts had the same comment then as well.

It is important for webmasters and SEOs to know that Google wants to go deeper into content and if you are hiding things within JavaScript or AJAX, don't expect Google to not find it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Hacker News.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: November 28, 2025

Nov 28, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Ads Account Hijacks, Thanksgiving Google Volatility & Web Guide For All

Nov 28, 2025 - 8:01 am
Spiders

OpenAI Scales Up Crawling & Bots For The Holidays

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google

Google's Sundar Pichai Monitors X On Launch Days For Feedback

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

Gemini 3 Now Powering Google AI Mode For Some Queries, Automatically

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google AI Overviews Showcases Events With New Results

Nov 28, 2025 - 7:21 am
 
Previous Story: Guggenheim Museum's Phone Number Wrong On Google