1. How to fix JavaScript
SEO problems on a
scale
Serge Bezborodov
JetOctopus
slideshare.net/sergebezborodov
@sergebezborodov

2. JetOctopus Serge Bezborodov
What is the difference between
modern JavaScript websites
and
old-school

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modern JavaScript website
JavaScript Application
old-school
HTML Documents

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Applications have bugs

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BUGS = Google can’t render page properly

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JavaScript SEO is mostly about
pages rendered properly

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JavaScript SEO = QA

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Let’s go with the most usual
JavaScript bugs

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JS Bug #1: Page can’t be fully rendered
-page loads quite a long time
-page can’t be fully rendered (you don’t see a footer)
-page became fully loaded after some interaction (scroll, click)
test cases:

10. JetOctopus Serge Bezborodov
JS Bug #2: Incomplete content
-page misses some content blocks
-JavaScript removes some content (I’m not joking)
test cases:

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JS Bug #3: JavaScript redirects
window.location.href = “/new-page.html”
redirect without 301/302 server status codes
JavaScript Code:

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JS Bug #4: Different content for User-agents

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JS Bug #5: SSR is broken
-text/HTML ratio closer to 0

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JS Bug #6: SSR misses some content
-SSR should have the same content as the client-rendered
page (with very few exceptions)
-make custom extraction rules for blocks, elements, or text
test cases:

15. JetOctopus Serge Bezborodov
JS Bug #7: Changed titles, meta by JS
-JavaScript may change page title, meta description
-JavaScript may change <meta name=“robots”>
test cases:

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JS Bug #7: robots.txt - shot in the foot
- robots.txt rules are applied to JavaScript files as well
- subdomains may have their own robots.txt (huge attention here!!!)
- never analyze robots.txt only by eyes, use the tools!

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JS Bug #7: robots.txt - shot in the foot
pages with ?utm_source will not be crawled by Googlebot

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JS Bug #7: robots.txt - shot in the foot
and JavaScript files as well
page may be not rendered fully

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JS Bug #7: robots.txt - shot in the foot
subdomains may have own robots.txt !!!!!!!

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- I checked a bunch of template pages,
everything works fine
The common way of JS QA

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- nope, check more

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check more = crawl more
not hundreds of pages but tens of thousands

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JavaScript Errors setup in Screaming Frog

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in JetOctopus enabled by default

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Bonus part

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How JS can harm log file analysis

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It’s not a page crawled by GBot but JS requests

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Make sure, you exclude JS requests
from your log file analysis

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Crawl budget is the amount of crawled
pages,
not JS requests made during pages
rendering

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Conclusions
-JavaScript is already with us and won’t go shortly
-JavaScript SEO is all about troubleshooting
-you can do almost nothing by yourself
-make strong communication with the developers' team
-without tools, it’s impossible to do it on a scale

31. JetOctopus Serge Bezborodov
Thank you
@sergebezborodov
Extended JavaScript Crawler JetOctopus.com
7 days free trial