I'll help you trade an imposter syndrome for a technical SEO superpower. My mission is to break down and simplify complex technical SEO things so that you can understand and use them to advance your SEO career.
😱 The truth about Google and JavaScript
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Here’s the truth every SEO needs to know: No matter how great your website is, if Google can’t index it due to JavaScript issues, you’re missing out on traffic opportunities. JavaScript is a great option to make website pages more interactive and less boring. But it’s also a good way to kill a website’s SEO if implemented incorrectly. Ok, so is JavaScript really that bad? The answer is ‘no’ if JavaScript is implemented on a website using best practices. And that’s exactly what I’m going to cover below. ✅ Add links according to the web standards NOT: ✅ Add images according to the web standards NOT:
✅ Use server-side rendering If you want Google to read and rank your content, you should make sure this content is available on the server, not just in a user’s browser. You need to make sure that rendered HTML shows the right information such as:
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I'll help you trade an imposter syndrome for a technical SEO superpower. My mission is to break down and simplify complex technical SEO things so that you can understand and use them to advance your SEO career.
Do you know what the Critical rendering path is? It’s what your browser goes through in order to build a beautiful usable page from your source code. It requires communication between the server and browser: Steps to render a page in a browser (Critical rendering path) Begin constructing the DOM by parsing HTML incrementally Request CSS and JS files Parse CSS and construct CSSOM Execute JS, build a render tree Merge Document and CSS Object Models Run layout and paint Optimizing critical...
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to you: Google uses rendered HTML of your page to evaluate the page’s optimization. First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page here. What is rendered HTML? Rendered HTML is displayed after CSS and JavaScript are processed. It means that if you’re only relying on the source code for your SEO efforts, it’s easy to miss many important things that can be altered by JavaScript, such as: Rewritten title tag A sneaked noindex tag A removed canonical Added/removed...
Critical knowledge alert 🚨🚨🚨 As a technical SEO, it’s crucial you know the difference between source code and rendered HTML them. Source code It is the initial code of the page before any JavaScript files are executed and CSS files are parsed. It’s the code you see when viewing the source code of a page in your browser. Rendered HTML It is displayed after CSS and JavaScript are processed. When you inspect an element on a page using Chrome dev tools, you’re looking at the rendered HTML. Why is...