Google and DOM Scripting
Now I am sure I know the answer to this question but I just want to see it happen anyway. What if you use javascript to insert content via the DOM? Does it get spidered and indexed at all? I have whipped up a very quick experiment to see what happens.
Google please spider my dynamic content, it would make my life easier in the near future.
Results
Well, as I figured we get no love from the search engines with content generated via the DOM and javascript.
See results below:
As you can see from the original test page the dynamic content has not been read or indexed by the search engines.
Comments
- Lachlan Hardy says: November 26, 2006 @ 3:27 pm
I love that this page is the second result for Standardzilla in Google (after the homepage) and that the only other page indexed by Google at all is your test page - static HTML content only, of course…
So I’m guessing that worked out the way you expected. But my question is, why aren’t your other posts in Google’s index?
- Standardzilla says: November 26, 2006 @ 3:53 pm
Hmm. That was fast. So yes, it turned out how I expected and we can confirm that spiders do not index DOM generated content, even if it’s on the initial onload.
@Lauchy - The other pages are being dropped because it sees them as too similar to include at the moment. You can see if you click on 1) click “see similar pages” 2) click “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link on bottom.
It’s currently grabbing my navigation as a snippet so that could be it. I will do something about this soon, but I am setting up for another experiment first. MSN is taking forever though.
- Tim Lucas says: November 27, 2006 @ 10:45 pm
You knew those were going to be the results didn’t you ;)
- Lachlan Hardy says: November 28, 2006 @ 3:11 pm
Aha. Cool
