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

 
- YouTube
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: June 13, 2025

Jun 13, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google AI Mode Search, Apple Intelligence Updates, Google Live Search, AI Content, SEO & Google Ads

Jun 13, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google

Google Is Now Rolling Out AI Mode In The US

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google Drops Support For Seven Existing Structured Data Markups

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google Ads

Google Ads Shows Audience Size For Custom Segments

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google

Google Search Autocomplete With Back To All

Jun 13, 2025 - 7:21 am
Previous Story: Guggenheim Museum's Phone Number Wrong On Google