It turns out that there’s an industry out there making money by algorithmically mashing up kids videos in ways to manipulate search rankings, without much apparent care about how their content could potentially traumatize some children. This is well worth a read, if only as another piece of evidence that algorithms often do not have human ethics baked in and the unintended effects this can have.
Yet another reason to not assume your JavaScript will always run, or if it does run, that it will run in its entirety:
I’m told: Yes, it’s 2016; of course Google executes JavaScript.
But I’m also told: Server-side rendering is necessary for SEO.
If Google can run JavaScript and thereby render client-side views, why is server-side rendering necessary for SEO? Okay, Google isn’t the only search engine, but it’s obviously an important one to optimize for.
Recently I ran a simple experiment to see to what extent the Google crawler understands dynamic content. I set up a web page at doesgoogleexecutejavascript.com which does the following:
- The HTML from the server contains text which says “Google does not execute JavaScript.”
- There is some inline JavaScript on the page that changes the text to “Google executes JavaScript, but only if it is embedded in the document.”
- The HTML also links to a script which, when loaded, changes the text to “Google executes JavaScript, even if the script is fetched from the network. However, Google does not make AJAX requests.”
- That script makes an AJAX request and updates the text with the response from the server. The server returns the message “Google executes JavaScript and even makes AJAX requests.”
After I launched this page, I linked to it from its GitHub repository and waited for Google to discover it.
[…]
It seems Google is not guaranteed to run your JavaScript automatically. You may have to manually trigger a crawl. And, even then, Google apparently won’t do any AJAX requests your page may depend on, or at least it didn’t in my case.
[…]
My conclusion is: Google may or may not decide to run your JavaScript, and you don’t want your business to depend on its particular inclination of the day. Do server-side/universal/isomorphic rendering just to be safe.