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Reflections on search engine optimization, web analytics and web marketing

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Google Crawling and Execution of JavaScript: where are we at today?

January 10th, 2009 by sean · 2 Comments

For a long time, Google’s advice to website developers was to keep things simple to ensure search engine spiders could successfully crawl and process website content:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.1

In reality, Google often found links in Flash objects, significantly improving this ability as announced last June (creating much confusion by misrepresenting this as a new feature rather than an improvement). And despite the hoopla, there are still many good reasons to avoid Flash.

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How do search engines, such as Google, handle JavaScript and CSS?

May 10th, 2007 by sean · No Comments

A frequent Search Engine Optimization question is “how do search engines such as Google handle JavaScript and CSS?“

Historically, search engines processed web pages much like an old text video browser such as lynx. A search engine only “saw” what the simplest browser could display – simple html.

Much for this reason, search engine optimization consultants have long advocated that site developers keep site coding simple, avoid hiding navigation systems in JavaScript menus and the like.

Today the situation is more complex. Google and the other search engines will try to extract links from anything they can – from PDF files to JavaScript embedded in a web page. This process is not foolproof, however – a site should still avoid relying solely on a JavaScript based navigation system, especially when CSS is a better choice.

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Web Analytics: Embedded JavaScript Page Tracking Code vs. Web Server Log Files

March 11th, 2006 by sean · No Comments

Web Analytics tracking choices with advantages and disadvantages

Basic Web Analytics tools usually fall into one of two categories:

  • Web server log file based
  • JavaScript embedded page tags

Both have advantages and disadvantages.

By default, server logs contain much richer data than that usually tracked by JavaScript page tracking. For organizations focused on search engine visibility, web server logs show which pages have been crawled by each search engine crawler – and how recently.

  • JavaScript page tracking code does not trigger when a page is downloaded by automated robots. Proponents of JavaScript systems tout this as beneficial – their systems only track human activity. This is really just putting a brave face on a limitation. Better web log file analysis systems are able to separate human from non-human traffic.
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Creating Search Engine Friendly Drop-down menus using CSS

March 6th, 2006 by sean · No Comments

JavaScript drop-down menus are employed by many medium to large size web sites as primary navigation tool for site visitors. Drop-down menus offer many advantages. They are already familiar to computer uses who encounter them in almost all mainstream software. By collapsing when not needed, the menus take up little screen space – yet offer a wealth of options when the user hovers over one of the visible categories.

Technically, the use of JavaScript to code drop-down menus is problematic. While some code can be relegated to an external JavaScript file, much JavaScript usually ends up bloating HTML pages. In most cases, search engine crawlers are not able to follow the JavaScript navigation links, leading to poor search engine crawling and visibility.

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Web Analytics Embedded JavaScript Page Tracking Code: Place at the top or bottom of the page?

January 26th, 2006 by sean · No Comments

Hosted web analytics reporting systems commonly use JavaScript code embedded in site pages to track user viewings of each website page (alternatively the systems download and report on data contained in web server log files).

Web Analytics system vendors provide instructions specifying where to place the JavaScript code in a site’s html pages. Usually the tracking code is placed in the page heading section (<head>), or at the page bottom, right before the body closing tag, </body>.

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