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.

 

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