Hi Bryan I recently had the chance to speak with some good SEO types and the subject of javascript did come up. The bottom line is don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen in any search engine.
I think its easy to appreciate how difficult it would be for a search engine to do this. You'd essentially be creating a virtual browser machine which would be loading a page and executing it (as you point out) but it's not so simple, how much execution should be done? How to does the engine know when to stop? It's kind of a halting problem. The other thing we have to keep in mind is that the cost of this is pretty high and there are a *lot* of pages out there to index. I feel your pain, I'd like to create a commenting system using GWT, but any of the content in that commenting system is going to have to be sent down to the client in HTML if I want it indexed. I was discussing another similar problem I have where we use a component that is wrapped by an iframe, how much of the content in that iframe is going to get parsed? Not clear. jos On Jan 23, 11:59 pm, 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. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
