Yesterday at PubCon, Gary Illyes from Google said you can use the noscript tag as a way to give Google more content around your lazy loaded images. I was always under the impression that Google ignored the noscript tag, at least for the past several years. In fact, John Mueller said it as recently as the other day on Twitter:
We probably ignore that, sounds like it would be better to just fix the page :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 11, 2018
We generally ignore noscript for content, but I'm curious what you see :)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 11, 2018
I asked Gary to clarify during the Q&A portion of the session and Gary said they do index and use content within the noscript tag for both images and web content.
John Mueller from Google did confirm they use it for images:
That twitter thread was about using it as a replacement for textual content -- we do support them for indexing images.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 17, 2018
Dawn even shared a slide from John's Google I/O session on this:
From Google I/O @JohnMu session on lazyloading images :) pic.twitter.com/kHhmu2DGsg
— Dawn Anderson (@dawnieando) October 17, 2018
John also posted in German on Twitter this morning it is used for images not normal web content:
But when it comes to web content, John has been telling us for years Google ignores the content. But Gary says Google does not.
Of course, this is super easy to test and see who is right - right?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
