We get lots of questions every day - in our Webmaster office hours, at conferences, in the webmaster forum and on Twitter. One of the more frequent themes among these questions are links and especially those generated through JavaScript.
In our Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks video series, we recently addressed the most frequently asked questions on Links and JavaScript:
Note: This video has subtitles in many languages available, too.
During the live premiere, we also had a Q&A session with a few additional questions from the community and decided to publish those questions and our answers along with some other frequently asked questions around the topic of links and JavaScript.
Googlebot parses the HTML of a page, looking for links to discover the URLs of related pages to crawl. To discover these pages, you need to make your links actual HTML links, as described in the webmaster guidelines on links.
Googlebot extracts the URLs from the href attribute of your links and then enqueues them for crawling. This means that the URL needs to be resolvable or simply put: The URL should work when put into the address bar of a browser. See the webmaster guidelines on links for more information.
As long as these links fulfill the criteria as per our webmaster guidelines and outlined above, yes.
When Googlebot renders a page, it executes JavaScript and then discovers the links generated from JavaScript, too. It's worth mentioning that link discovery can happen twice: Before and after JavaScript executed, so having your links in the initial server response allows Googlebot to discover your links a bit faster.
Fragment URLs, also known as "hash URLs", are technically fine, but might not work the way you expect with Googlebot.
Fragments are supposed to be used to address a piece of content within the page and when used for this purpose, fragments are absolutely fine.
Sometimes developers decide to use fragments with JavaScript to load different content than what is on the page without the fragment. That is not what fragments are meant for and won't work with Googlebot. See the JavaScript SEO guide on how the History API can be used instead.
The AJAX crawling scheme has long been deprecated. Do not rely on it for your pages.
The recommendation for this is to use the History API and migrate your web apps to URLs that do not rely on fragments to load different content.
This post was inspired by the first installment of the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks, but make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos to come! We definitely recommend joining the premieres on YouTube to participate in the live chat and Q&A session for each episode!
If you are interested to see more Webmaster Conference Lightning Talks, check out the video Google Monetized Policies and subscribe to our channel to stay tuned for the next one!
Join the webmaster community in the upcoming video premieres and in the YouTube comments!
In this time of a global pandemic, webmasters across the world—from government officials to health organizations—are frequently updating their websites with the latest information meant to help fight the spread of COVID-19 and provide access to resources. However, they often lack the time or funding to translate this content into multiple languages, which can prevent valuable information from reaching a diverse set of readers. Additionally, some content may only be available via a file, e.g. a .pdf or .doc, which requires additional steps to translate.
To help these webmasters reach more users, we’re reopening access to the Google Translate Website Translator—a widget that translates web page content into 100+ different languages. It uses our latest machine translation technology, is easy to integrate, and is free of charge. To start using the Website Translator widget, sign up here.
Please note that usage will be restricted to government, non-profit, and/or non-commercial websites (e.g. academic institutions) that focus on COVID-19 response. For all other websites, we recommend using the Google Cloud Translation API.
Google Translate also offers both webmasters and their readers a way to translate documents hosted on a website. For example, if you need to translate this PDF file into Spanish, go to translate.google.com and enter the file’s URL into the left-hand textbox , then choose “Spanish” as the target language on the right. The link shown in the right-hand textbox will take you to the translated version of the PDF file. The following file formats are supported: .doc, .docx, .odf, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .ps, .rtf, .txt, .xls, or .xlsx.
Finally, it’s very important to note that while we continuously look for ways to improve the quality of our translations, they may not be perfect - so please use your best judgement when reading any content translated via Google Translate.
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