Googlebot and Document.Write

With JavaScript/AJAX being used to place dynamic content in pages, I was wondering how Google indexed web page content that was placed in a page using the JavaScript "document.write" method. I created a page with six unique words in it. Two were in the plain HTML; two were in a script within the page document; and two were in a script that was externally sourced from a different server. The page appeared in the Google index late last night and I just wrote up the results.

Comments

Nonsense words?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

An alert came in in the late evening of March 10th for "zonkdogfology", one of the words in the first pair

zonkdogfology is a real word:

zonk-dog-fol-o-gy zohnk-dog--ful-uh-jee
noun, plural -gies.

1. the name given to articles from zonk where the summary makes no sense whatsoever.

Serious question now - is the author of the article worried that the ensuing slashdot discussion will mention all his other nonsense words? I've no doubt slashdotters will find & mention the other words here, polluting google's index....

Re:Nonsense words?

[Anonymous Coward]

zonkdogfology is a real word:

It's a perfectly cromulent word, and it's use embiggens all of us.

Google Pigeon technolog

[sdugoten2]

The Google Pigeon is smart enough to read through Document.write. Duh!

If you want to see

[BrynM]

If you want to see through a search engine's eyes, open the page in Lynx. The funniest part about showing that method to another developer is when they think Lynx is broken because the page is empty. "It didn't load. How do I refresh the page? This browser sucks." Heh. Endless fun.

(method does not account for image crawlers)

Re:How does document.write mess up your DOM tree?

[hackstraw]

One of the most clever uses of document.write I've seen was something like: document.write("<--") YOU NEED JAVSCRIPT FOR THIS PAGE document.write("--&gt")