Google: Why It May Appear Your JavaScript Page Is Not Fully Rendered Before Indexed

Mark Williams-Cook posted the results of an SEO Twitter poll that said most believe Google does not fully render a JavaScript page/document prior to ranking. In fact, the results showed that almost 70% of SEOs felt those pages were not always rendered prior to Google indexing them.

In Ep6 of "Search Off the Record" @g33konaut says "in almost 100% of cases your website gets crawled>rendered>indexed"

I asked #SEOtwitter and 68% said this wasn't the case.

I wonder why such a disparity? 🤔@methode @JohnMu pic.twitter.com/W1lCUX9Anz

— Mark Williams-Cook = 🅼🅰🆁🅺 🅲🅾🅾🅺 (@thetafferboy) November 29, 2020

The issue is, Google has said that it almost 100% of the time will render a JavaScript document prior to indexing. So why such a discrepancy between what Google says and what SEOs see?

Martin Splitt of Google said it seems to be around that it is hard for SEOs to tell the status of an indexing state in Google Search. He said there "no obvious indication of the rendering state on one hand and the fact that things happen in parallel make it even more difficult to judge this externally." He added there are also "canonicalization surprises and indexing decisions and ranking making it hard to judge."

John Mueller of Google jumped in also to say "imo this falls into the category of things folks don't have data about, but where outliers stand out. Also, anything "almost always" is super-hard to evaluate. Given the split though, I think things are on the right path, and folks have learned a ton more about JS SEO."

Here are those tweets:

Yeah, imo this falls into the category of things folks don't have data about, but where outliers stand out. Also, anything "almost always" is super-hard to evaluate. Given the split though, I think things are on the right path, and folks have learned a ton more about JS SEO

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) November 30, 2020

Here is an example they spoke about:

Ah that's a beautiful example of the complications.

We might. We might not, because the other title might win over the rendered title or we may rewrite the title entirely in SERPs. The HTML in the URL inspection tool should show the rendered title in the indexed HTML tho.

— Martin Splitt @ home 🏡🇨🇭 (@g33konaut) November 30, 2020

Ah nice, you see I said "should" 😁
It's possible for the rendering to fail or be delayed by a bunch of things, then you may see that kind of situation.

Was that doc indexed in these three weeks or was it in the index before? And how often did we crawl it during the 3 weeks?

— Martin Splitt @ home 🏡🇨🇭 (@g33konaut) November 30, 2020

Interesting responses - what do you all think?

Forum discussion at Twitter.