Correct indexing of the JavaScript content of a web page is one of the following most common problems those that technical SEO pros face, especially on pages based on JavaScript frameworks.
Websites created with frameworks like Angular, React or Vue.js are becoming more and more popular, although it is more difficult to manage SEO.
Websites and templates created with JavaScript-based frameworks like Angular, React or Vue.js are very common and often have performance problems when used in conjunction with CRM like Shopify or WordPress. With this in mind, a common problem is usually loss of loading speed or performance issues that affect the positioning and visibility of the website.
In this article we will try to resolve all doubts and explain what JavaScript is to improve how it works:
What is JavaScript?
JavaScript or JS is a programming language. Together with HTML and CSS, they are the most common languages for creating websites. With that in mind, you can use JavaScript to create functions that Improve user interaction with the elements of the page in the form of animated graphics, image carousels, interactive forms, maps or browser games.
For a number of years it has been a common practice among web developers to create websites with JavaScript only using frameworks like React or Angular, which leads to some SEO performance issues.
What is JavaScript SEO?
It is part of technical search engine optimization which tries to index and analyze web pages created with this language more easily for Google Spider.
With that in mind, JavaScript SEO has started its own set of rules and challenges too, because in many cases a web developer or programmer is required to debug and review all of the code.
How does Google index JavaScript pages?
There are three steps to indexing: page analysis, rendering, and finally indexing.
For a normal website created with HTML and CSS, the analysis begins when Google downloads the website’s HTML file, extracts all the links from it, and sends the CSS file to Caffeine, the algorithm responsible for indexing the website. Page.
For a JavaScript web page, the process is similar in that the Googlebot downloads the HTML file from the website. In this case, however, the links are generated using JavaScript so the robot will download the CSS and JS files and use Caffeine’s Web Rendering Service tool to render the webpage and index its content.
As you can see, indexing a webpage made with JavaScript is much more complex than indexing a traditional webpage, as Google cannot index anything until the JS file has been rendered by Caffeine.
How can you improve the SEO of a JavaScript page?
The first step is to make sure that Google can do this Access to the JS file and that you can render it properly. With that in mind, you can use the Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool to make sure that Google can correctly render a webpage created with JavaScript.
With that in mind, the most common reason Google can’t access and render these files is usually because the user blocked the Googlebot for their Robots.txt file. Often this blockage is accidental, but it has a negative impact on search engine optimization. So check that the file contains the following lines:
«User agent: Googlebot
Allow: .js
Allow: .css »
After checking these points, the indexing must be checked again using the Google Search Console. If you find pages on the website without being indexed, a manual re-indexing must be requested through the Google tool.
