Google Shows How To Confirm Indexing Issues Due To JavaScript via @sejournal, @martinibuster

SearchNorwich recently published an excellent video featuring Google’s Martin Splitt discussing how to debug crawling and indexing issues related to JavaScript, saying that most of the times it’s not JavaScript that’s causing indexing issues, the actual cause is something else. Even if you don’t know how to code with JavaScript, the tips that Martin shares will enable anyone to get a good start on debugging crawl issues that are originating on a website.

JavaScript Is Rarely The Cause Of SEO Issues

Martin’s SearchNorwich video was published a month ago. Just a few days ago John Mueller advises that too much JavaScript can have a negative impact on SEO, which aligns with Martin’s assertion that JavaScript is rarely the reason for SEO issues, that it’s either the misuse of JavaScript or something else entirely.

He explains that of the issues that virtually all suspected JavaScript issues that get emailed to him end up being something else. He pins the blame on a flawed approach to debugging SEO issues. What he describes is confirmation bias, which is suspecting that something is the cause and then looking for clues to justify that opinion. The definition of confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret existing evidence or to look for evidence that confirms existing beliefs, while ignoring evidence that contradicts those beliefs.

Martin explained:

“…it seems to me, as someone on the Google side of things, that SEOs look for clues that allow them to blame things they’re seeing on JavaScript. Then they show up, or someone from their team shows up, in my inbox or on my social media and says, “We found a bug. It’s JavaScript. You say JavaScript works in Google Search, but we have a strong hint that it doesn’t, and you know it’s because of JavaScript.”

He goes on to say that out of hundreds of times a year that he’s approached with a diagnosis that JavaScript is to blame for an SEO problem he has only seen one actual instance where an actual bug related to JavaScript was to blame. Just one.

He also says:

“People often claim, “You say it works if you use client-side rendering, but clearly, it is not working. It must be a JavaScript problem and maybe even a bug in Google.” Surprisingly, many of the people who end up in my inbox suspect it’s a Google bug. I find that interesting, especially when a small, niche website claims to be affected by a bug that doesn’t affect any other websites. Most of the time, it’s not us—it’s you.”

Splitt explains that when JavaScript is involved in a crawling or rendering issue, it’s most often not because JavaScript is to blame but rather it’s being used incorrectly

Finding Source Of Rendering Issues

Martin suggests debugging rendering issues by checking how Google “sees” the web page. Rendering, in the context of Googlebot crawling, is the process of downloading all the resources from a web page like fonts, JavaScript, CSS and HTML and then creating fully functional web page that’s similar to what a human user would experience in a web browser.

Debugging how Google renders a page may show that the page renders fine, that certain parts don’t render or that the page cannot be indexed at all.

He recommends using the following tools for debugging possible JavaScript issues:

1. Google Search Console URL Inspection Tool

2. Google Rich Results Test

3. Chrome Dev Tools

Easy JavaScript Debugging

Both of the first two tools let you submit a URL that gets immediately crawled by Google and they’ll show you the rendered page, what the page looks like for Google for indexing purposes.

Martin explains the usefulness of the JavaScript console messages in Chrome Dev Tools:

“There’s also more info that gives you very helpful details about what happened in the JavaScript console messages and what happened in the network. If your content is there and it’s what you expect it to be, then it’s very likely not going to be JavaScript that is causing the problem. If people were doing just that, checking these basics, 90% of the people showing up in my inbox would not show up in my inbox. That’s what I do.”

He also explained that just because the JavaScript console flags an error that doesn’t mean that the problem is with the JavaScript itself. He uses the example of an error in how JavaScript failed to execute that was caused by an API that’s blocked by Robots.txt, preventing the page from rendering.

Why Do So Many SEOs Blame JavaScript?

Martin implies that not knowing how to debug JavaScript is the cause of the reputation it’s received as a cause of crawling and indexing issues. I get it, I learned the basics of coding JavaScript by hand 25 years ago and I disliked it then and now, it’s never been my thing.

But Martin’s right that knowing a few tricks for debugging JavaScript will save a lot of wasted time chasing down the wrong problem.

Watch Martin Splitt’s presentation here:

Maybe It Isn’t JavaScript – Martin Splitt at SearchNorwich 18

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Artem Samokhvalov