Ladies and gentlemen, this is the inaugural post of Rank and File, a new video series that we’ll be doing every Wednesday here at iPullRank. While this first posting will obviously remind you of Rand Fishkin’s/Moz’s Whiteboard Friday, I don’t intend to limit it to just whiteboard videos. Rather, I’ll use this space for those as well as screen share videos, interviews, overly-produced green screen videos, or maybe even Will Smith-style raves and rants with drone photography — if the spirit moves me. I just want to use this space with very few rules and more opportunities to creatively share insights. In other words, if Whiteboard Friday is the Daily Show, I want “Rank and File” to be Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas.
Since my conference presentations are often quite dense, I realize that there is value in going more in-depth in a more bite-sized 10-15 minute format on a single subset of the bigger subject. My goal is to bring you something worth thinking about and/or adding to your arsenal as a marketer every Wednesday.
If there’s anything you want to hear about, feel free to join the conversation here in the comments, on Twitter, our Facebook page, or LinkedIn and we’ll be working the more interesting subjects into the queue.
Before we get into it, I want to give a shout-out to our amazing designer, Jay Jacobsen, for whipping up the bumper animations and wrangling the poorly lit whiteboard room at Tower 49. I also want to give a shout-out to Tonedeff for providing the bumper music.
Now, without further adieu, I give you “How to Audit JavaScript Websites.”
Additional Resources:
- Googlebot is Chrome
- Just How Smart are Search Robots
- Pete’s post on BuiltVisible
- Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO
- Deliver search-friendly JavaScript-powered websites (Google I/O ’18)
- Caniuse.com on Chrome 41
Now over to you, what issues have you run into with JavaScript and SEO?
7 Comments
Awesome video. Just three more things.
You can debug issues using code like this:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/debug-rendering
And second you can see rendering code in “Fetch & Render” in SearchConsole or using MFT or RRT:
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
if there is some issue you can see JS Console there with all messages and errors if there is any.
And last one. You can get Chrome 41 on your computer and test it on local computer too:
https://moz.com/blog/google-shares-details-googlebot
Another spot I had is that the new URL Inspection tool lets you view source and it’s the rendered version (or maybe the currently used version).
That’s nice!
Nice post Mike. Sorry to link drop in comments #2009, but we tested the progressive style that you mentioned and wanted to share that our findings were the same. When we made the content visible without the need for JS, the site got an increase of around 6%. If anyone is interested, you can read the case study here: https://www.distilled.net/resources/split-testing-javascript-for-seo/
Nice video, but is there a way I can get the Wistia video fullscreen? I don’t see that option on the toolbar.
I did ctrl+ a few times 🙂
I has a client doing some dynamic canonical tag changes, which gave me the opportunity to see what Googlebot got up to. I found it sometimes used the rendered version, but would flipflop what it used over time. Conclusion: Do not set the wrong canonical in the raw html, and do not rely on rendered canonical settings being seen.
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