Google Gives Updated Guidance On JavaScript, Progressive Web Apps

On Friday, Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller gave webmasters an update on the current state and recommendations for JavaScript sites and progressive web apps in Google Search. As he notes, ...
Google Gives Updated Guidance On JavaScript, Progressive Web Apps
Written by Chris Crum
  • On Friday, Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller gave webmasters an update on the current state and recommendations for JavaScript sites and progressive web apps in Google Search.

    As he notes, none of the recommendations are completely new. In all, there are eight recommendations. I’ll give you the short version here:

    1. Use rel=canonical when serving content from multiple URLs.

    2. Avoid the AJAX-Crawling scheme on new sites.

    3. Avoid using “#” in URLs (outside of “#!”).

    4. Use Search Console’s Fetch and Render tool to test how Googlebot sees your pages.

    5. Ensure that all required resources aren’t blocked by robots.txt.

    6. Limit the number of embedded resources, in particular the number of JavaScript files and server responses required to render your page.

    7. Google supports the use of JavaScript to provide titles, description & robots meta tags, structured datas, and other meta-data.

    8. Remember that other search engines and web services accessing your content might not support JavaScript at all, or might support a different subset.

    You should definitely read Mueller’s post for additional details on each of these, including some AMP-specific guidance. Google began sending search traffic to AMP pages last month.

    Image via Google

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