Important Alert:
Summary: This article intends to help identify commonly encountered JavaScript SEO issues and explain how to fix them.
Key Takeaways:-
There are several challenges associated with using JavaScript, especially when it comes to SEO. This is where JavaScript SEO becomes relevant, it helps developers and SEOs diagnose and resolve JavaScript-related issues that can impact the website’s search engine rankings.
Optimising a JavaScript website for search engines requires a different approach compared with HTML websites. Traditional HTML websites are easy to crawl and index by search engines such as Google. However, search engines encounter several rendering issues when attempting to crawl and index pages with JavaScript. Using JavaScript frameworks for SEO can address some of these challenges, helping ensure your site remains both dynamic and optimized for search.
This guide will help you identify these rendering issues and explain how you can fix them.
Get insights on evolving customer behaviour, high volume keywords, search trends, and more.
This is one of the most commonly encountered issues. Here’s how pre-rendered HTML can pose issues for JavaScript SEO,
1. Pre-rendered HTML often has trouble reflecting real-time updates and information that are critical to your webpage.
2. It struggles to interact with interactive and dynamic content which can lead to static user experience, in short, completely defeating the purpose of JavaScript in the first place.
3. Maintaining pre-rendered HTML with server-side logic and client-side scripting often leads to difficulty in code maintenance. Changes to one could cause issues in another because of which consistent management is required.
Together these kinds of issues can mean that search engines are unable to crawl and index your webpage, leading to a decrease in your search engine rankings.
1. Correct Referencing: HTML links need to reference with <a> tags and href attributes so that search engines can crawl and index your pages as well as understand the structure of your website.
2. Inspect Pre-rendered HTML: Use a browser. developer tools or other inspection tools to examine the pre-rendered HTML. This will help identify gaps between what’s pre-rendered and what’s expected.
3. Performance Optimisation: If pre-rendered HTML is slow, optimise its performance by reducing unnecessary code, utilising caching techniques, and compressing images.
We know how important it is for the search engine to be able to render a URL, but often there are elements of a page that are inaccessible to crawlers. This could occur because there are broken internal links or missing content served in Javascript that search engines are unable to access.
Common causes:
1. Errors in JavaScript – Often these errors include simple syntax issues which make rendering difficult since it becomes hard to read HTML elements, structure the content on your webpage, and understand the relationship between them.
2. User Interaction – Google can’t render content that requires users to interact with the page – it needs instructions like content that can be ‘clicked’ or has options such as dropdowns. Such information, such as the content beneath your drop-down, also needs to be accessible for rendering. To check this, you can ‘inspect’ the page to see if the ‘hidden’ content is in the HTML.
1. Debug JavaScript: Debug to identify issues and errors. Ensure that you are regularly checking for console errors and logs. Additionally, test the embedded JavaScript on different browsers to identify rendering discrepancies.
2. Create Logical Structure: To ensure that user interaction has clear instructions, map out a clear logical site structure.
3. Adding Structural Data: Adding structural data such as JSON-LD or microdata markup to the webpage is also useful since it provides additional information to your content and makes it easier for search engines to crawl.
Ensuring your page is crawled correctly by Google, is the only way in which it can be sent to a queue for rendering.
Common reasons why your webpage may not be crawlable include:
1. Internal Links cannot be crawled – When despite having a well-linked site, you see orphan pages pop up in your site audits, it’s because the internal links are not available in the pre-rendered HTML.
2. XML sitemap not updated – An outdated or missing sitemap causes Google to slow down when trying to render your pages. A custom sitemap will ensure that Google doesn’t have to render pages, follow internal links, queue them, and replicate this process until it has made sense of your sitemap.
1. Regularly Monitor: Make sure to monitor your website’s performance in search engine results and analyse crawl data to identify issues with the JavaScript-rendered content.
2. Follow SEO best practices: Your JavaScript-rendered content should always follow and keep updated with proven SEO practices, for example using descriptive titles, headings, and meta descriptions. This will improve visibility and ensure that all sections of your website are crawlable.
Missing internal links is a big impediment to crawlers and having your webpage discovered and shown up in SEO.
Common causes:
1. User interaction needed to access links – As established, content hidden behind a user interaction tool can lead to missing information and inaccessible links.Infinite page scrolling can also lead to missing links because it requires a user to arrive at each page for the crawler to access the entire content on the page. Therefore, even if the JavaScript is rendered, a crawler cannot access the links because the internal links for each page are not loaded until the user scrolls to that point.
2. Links not coded properly – If the internal links within your page are not coded properly, it means that the linking structure is missing because of which a crawler cannot follow these layers of your webpage.
1. Server-Side rendering (SSR) or Pre-rendering: Using SSR or pre-rendering techniques to generate HTML with links before putting them onto the webpage will ensure that these links are not inaccessible.
2. Alternative Content: Consider including noscript tags in your HTML which will provide alternative content for users who have JavaScript disabled or for when it’s not working effectively. This way you will be able to provide essential information and links without being caught in hidden links or errors – for both users and for search engine crawlers.
Within an HTML page, Metadata includes information like the heading, description, titles, etc. Missing metadata makes SEO challenging because it cannot be rendered successfully. These elements are critical for indexation, with the head being the most important.
This presents a missed opportunity for search engines to index and crawl your page. Look out for your content management system, which will have a text box specifically for meta descriptions. If you are unable to access this, make sure to accurately describe the contents of the page through headings and subheadings.
Script files and images have their URLs because of which they also need to be crawlable. If these files on your webpage are blocked from crawling, then Google is not able to render the entire page.
1. Check Robots.txt – Ensure that your website’s robots.txt file is not blocking Googlebot from accessing your javaScript, since Googlebot needs to be able to access these resources to understand the content of your page fully.
2. Submit XML Sitemaps: Include references to your Javascript-enabled pages in XML sitemaps and submit them to the Google search console. This ensures that Google can discover and crawl the resources on your page more effectively.
Page load speed is a ranking factor and Google frowns upon sites that are heavy to load. Javascript codes are usually large and if left unoptimised can hamper the site’s performance.
Server-side rendering (SSR) will help load heavy or large files faster because it can reduce layout shifts that hamper the user’s experience.
Use these 5 tools:
1. Google Search Console – Offers insights into how Google crawls and indexes your site, including JavaScript-related issues.
2. Lighthouse – Chrome’s tool audits site performance, accessibility, and SEO, highlighting JavaScript-related SEO problems.
3. Chrome DevTool – Provides features like the “Audits” panel to analyse site performance, accessibility, and SEO, including JavaScript issues.
4. SEO Crawlers (e.g., Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Sitebulb) – These tools crawl your site to identify JavaScript-rendered content and SEO issues.
5. Structured Data Testing Tool – Ensures Google understands JavaScript-generated structured data like Schema.org markup correctly for SEO purposes.
We have covered the more information on How to Use Google Search Console
Having a website built with JavaScript offers a dynamic and interactive user experience, but it can also create challenges for search engine optimization (SEO). This is where JavaScript SEO best practices come in!
We have a team of technical experts to identify and fix all the common SEO JavaScript issues discussed in this blog post. We’ll ensure your website is crawlable, indexable, and optimized for search engines – boosting your rankings and attracting more organic traffic.
Contact us for a free consultation and learn how our JavaScript SEO services can help you amplify your site’s performance.
Get insights on evolving customer behaviour, high volume keywords, search trends, and more.
Discover how we boosted our clients' search visibility and business growth.
View Case StudiesGet the most valuable search related insights about leading brands, trending keywords, search volumes, fastest growing categories, city-level insights and much more!
Explore Now
Build a Better Digital Marketing Strategy with Techmagnate’s Search Trends Reports
Join 150+ businesses maximizing their ROI !
Featuring brands like
and many more!
