Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Haha the article that just won't die!

For those who are interested, there was a follow up to the article here: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/google-stop-playing-the-ji...

And Dan Clarke did some independent tests here: http://www.danclarkie.co.uk/can-the-googlebot-read-javascrip...

This was all back in Oct - Dec of '11. Basically we learned that Googlebot handles JavaScript and AJAX pretty much like a browser.

When it comes to AJAX, it appears to index the content under the destination URL of the XHR in some cases, while indexing it as part of the page making the XHR in other instances. Something about the way the AJAX request is made causes Google to treat it like a 302 redirect at times.

Standard JS window.location redirects also appear to be treated as equivalent to 302 redirects.

@dsl - I suspect you're correct. The Google Toolbar, Chrome's Opt-In Program, The Search Quality Program, and now Google Analytics Data (since the TOS change) are probably all being used to train the behavior of Googlebot when interacting with elements on a page.

Google also has plenty of patents related to computer vision, and their self-driving car is road-worthy... so processing DOM renders of the page ala Firefox's 3D View/Tilt is probably small potatoes for them.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: