Melon Corporate Blog
Search Engine Optimisation Myths #1 – “Don’t use Javascript”
This entry is the first of what will be an ongoing series I will write aimed at clearing up a lot of the confusion and “voodoo” behind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
There is a lot of misinformation behind SEO techniques with some people thinking that SEO specialists have exclusive access to insider knowledge.
A lot of illogical or unfeasible “myths” for search engine optimisation have sprung up and have become false common knowledge.
The main issue with these myths are that you can land up paying for services based on misinformation and deny the use of useful technologies on your websites.
Today we are going to take a logical (and demonstrated) look at the myth that using Javascript on your pages (for things like animated menus) will penalise your search engine rankings.
First things first, what is Javascript? Javascript is a programming language that your web designers and developers may use to further enhance your site with things such as drop down menus – and is at the forefront of what the Next Generation web is all about (Web 2.0 onwards).
Javascript is an important element of the toolset to make websites interactive and user friendly websites – rather than the flat billboard sites that are no more interactive than if they were printed on paper.
Now the interesting thing about this myth is that it actually originally held some merit; it is bad to use Javascript events to redirect the web browser when a user clicks on something - the search engine doesn’t see this as a link and fails to spider it correctly.
This practice however is generally limited to “kid down the street” designer/developers and does not (unlike the myth suggests) relate to Javascript in general. I’d be willing to bet that some of the most user-friendly (and well ranked) sites you frequently visit rely heavily on Javascript to provide that experience.
Javascript is even used on the main menus of these sites; its just important in these Javascript menu structures to make sure that they are actual links “augmented” with Javascript rather than Javascript used to create the links in the first place.
For example this is the way the navigation of the Melon Media website has been built.
Further: go to http://www.google.com and click view source. See all those <script> tags? Google itself uses Javascript on its pages.
Google (and others) would never penalise sites for using Javascript per se, as most of the best known sites on the internet rely on it. Google, Youtube, Yahoo, Melon, Sydney Morning Herald and Ebay are all avid users of Javascript. Google (and other search engines) is not about making our lives hard for us – their sole goal is to deliver relevant content to their users.
The only time search engines “penalise” a site is usually because a technique has been used to “cheat the system” or because the engine doesn’t know how to work with the way the site was built.
For developers wanting to use Javascript in their pages – there are a few “good practice” points to keep in mind to make sure you make the spidering process easier for Google and other search engines:
- Put any large blocks of Javascript code that are used across multiple pages in an external Javascript file
- Avoid having more than 500kb of Javascript in a heavy application – or 100kb in a general website (unless you load things on demand)
- Never use the onClick event to change page locations especially in the sites main navigation. Use an <a> anchor element with its href attribute so google can easily see where it points.
I look forward to receiving thoughts and comments.
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