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Googlebot and Document.Write

Posted by kdawson on from the ajax-the-foaming-indexer dept.

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.

1 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. If they weren't, then they're trying by AnonymousCactus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Google needs to consider script if they want high-quality results. Besides the obvious fact that they'll miss content supplied by dynamic page elements, they could also sacrifice page quality. Page-rank and the like will get them very far, but an easy way to spam the search engines would be to have pages on a whole host of topics that immediately get rewritten as ads for Viagra as soon as they're downloaded by a Javascript-aware browser. It's interesting to know the extent to which they correct for this.

    Of course, there are much more subtle ways of changing content once it's been put out there. One might imagine a script that waits 10 seconds and then removes all relevant content and displays Viagra instead. Who knew web search would be restricted by the halting problem? I wonder how far Google goes...