Optimizing a JavaScript Site for Search Engines - Drawbacks of JavaScript in Respect to SEO
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Drawbacks of JavaScript in Respect to SEO
1. Cannot be read by search engine spiders
I mentioned one of the drawbacks of JavaScript with regards to SEO in my first paragraph of this article: search engines cannot read JavaScript. In fact, search engines have a very difficult time understanding client-side code in general. This means anything you put into JavaScript, including content, links, and other information, is simply not accessible to search engine spiders.
2. Text to Code Ratio
Large amounts of code in the web page gets in the way of textual content. When the search engine spider has to wade through lines and lines of code just to reach the true content of the page, then it’s never a good thing.
Text to Code ratios are measured by dividing the amount of actual content text that is search engine readable by the total number of words on the web page. So if you have code like in Figure-2, then your content to code ratio will be very low indeed.
Figure-2: Top half of the source code for the webpage in Figure-1
It is not known for sure what exact percentage of text to code your ratio should measure. However, we do know that more is always better. The higher the ratio percentage, the better your chances of being matched with relevancy in a search engine query. On top of that, the more text you have in your webpage, the better chance you have of being able to include your keywords without over-optimizing the page.
Figure-3: Text to Code Ratio for example web page
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