Eric Just to make sure I understood your last point, we should be looking for a search bot indicator like a URL parameter or something, and if we see it we should render our page as statically and flat as possible?
Thanks, jos On Jan 24, 5:01 am, Eric Ayers <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Bryan, > I understand your frustration. Unfortunately, due to the extremely > competitive nature of web search, we here at Google can't say a lot about > the Google bot or the roadmap for future improvements. Indexing JavaScript > apps is a general problem not particular to GWT. Obviously, this is one of > those problems everyone in the web apps & search community needs to keep > coming back to in order to find better ways to solve it. > > Just to give you an idea of the complexity involved, the first "page" of > JavaScript for GWT basically runs a big switch statement that loads a > different script depending on which browser is running (which browser should > the googlebot run. Which bugs should it emulate?). It doesn't actually > create the DOM until after the body of the document is finished loading > (when does it know to start looking at the DOM?). Your app might be > perfectly happy for the bot to index just the front page, but that is still > going to leave a huge swath of unhappy app developers. Another page might > present something on the first page that is not very indicative of the > content, like: "this browser is not supported" or "Login or create an > account" or "choose your region" using images before continuing. A page > might have tabs or a menu with content that doesn't actually get attached to > the DOM until after the tabs are clicked and has a message ("click on the > menu to ..."). > > Here's some spin for you: I think the message from the search side of > search engines isn't "Don't use JavaScript". Instead, the message is to > provide a page of HTML that faithfully describes your app and/or its content > when the search engine crawls your page. I know its more work, but think > about how that might actually be an opportunity for Web 2.0 authors. > > -Eric. > > > > On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 2:59 AM, bryanb <[email protected]> wrote: > > > That's the point of my query/question, Why can't the Google bot > > understand Javascript ? As I said originally, using Firebug I can see > > what the Javascript has rendered to the DOM, so there's no good reason > > the Google bot can;t do the same. Granted, it cannot follow links or > > any of the possibly unlimited execution paths in the Javascript, but > > it should be able to render the initial state of the page, and > > consequently index stuff on that page. Likewise if there is a site map > > with history tags, it should be able to render the initial state of > > each of those pages and index accordingly. The initial state is really > > all you want indexed anyway - if I do a Google search for "fubar", I > > reasonably expect the URLs returned to point to a page with "fubar" > > on it somewhere i.e. for a GWT app the initial state of that page. > > > It just seems a bit strange that one part of Google has created a tool > > for making really usable web sites, but the search side of Google says > > "don''t use Javascript" if you want to be indexed. > > -- > Eric Z. Ayers - GWT Team - Atlanta, GA USAhttp://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
