Googlebot is the crawler that visits web pages to include them within Google Search index. The number one question we got from the community at events and social media was if we could make Googlebot evergreen with the latest Chromium. Today, we are happy to announce that Googlebot now runs the latest Chromium rendering engine (74 at the time of this post) when rendering pages for Search. Moving forward, Googlebot will regularly update its rendering engine to ensure support for latest web platform features.
What that means for you
Compared to the previous version, Googlebot now supports 1000+ new features, like:
You should check if you’re transpiling or use polyfills specifically for Googlebot and if so, evaluate if this is still necessary. There are still some limitations, so check our
troubleshooter for JavaScript-related issues and the
video series on JavaScript SEO.
Any thoughts on this? Talk to us on
Twitter, the
webmaster forums, or join us for the
online office hours.
Posted by Martin Splitt, friendly internet fairy at the Webmasters Trends Analyst team
