Google Caching And Carousel

Hi All,

We have been using Walt’s carousel action, very nice I might add, and wondering if the html content inside the panes is being cached by Google. The first carousel pane is visible in googles cache.

  1. Is its content being read by the bots?

  2. What about the other pains that are not visible, are they being read and indexed?

Look forward to your input,
Dave


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Try viewing source in the cached version, and see if you can see it.
My guess is that the content (text) is there, but the JavaScript is
being stripped out of the cached version, and so the animation doesn’t
work.

The Action does not remove any content from the page, it just moves it
around so that most of it is hidden from normal view.

Walter

On May 3, 2011, at 5:34 PM, TeamSDA wrote:

Hi All,

We have been using Walt’s carousel action, very nice I might add,
and wondering if the html content inside the panes is being cached
by Google. The first carousel pane is visible in googles cache.

  1. Is its content being read by the bots?

  2. What about the other pains that are not visible, are they being
    read and indexed?

Look forward to your input,
Dave


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Hi Walt,

Yes the HTML content is in the source. What I am really trying to demystify is this.

  1. The first pane is visible in the page cached by google and yes there is no functionality. Would this indicate that that HTML content is being cached and that it is helping the SEO ranking?

  2. Is the content being cached and thus helping the SEO of the page from the panes that are not visible due to no functionality? Yes the content is in the source.

  3. I am asking #2 as we have been making some really cool stuff using other actions that reveals content hides it and such but due to the fact that content is apparently controlled by javascript, non of it is cached by Google nor is it even visible. Your action seems to be providing what appears to be some level of Progressive Enhancement. Could you elaborate?

Regards, Dave


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On May 4, 2011, at 12:41 PM, TeamSDA wrote:

Hi Walt,

Yes the HTML content is in the source. What I am really trying to
demystify is this.

  1. The first pane is visible in the page cached by google and yes
    there is no functionality. Would this indicate that that HTML
    content is being cached and that it is helping the SEO ranking?

Yes. If you can see the content using View Source, then so can Google.
Google does not run the scripts, but it doesn’t need the scripts in
order to see the content, because it reads through all of the source
code, and thus does not rely on any sort of visual tricks to influence
its ranking. That’s why I’m always harping on about a semantic page
structure, since it benefits both Google and my good friend Beverly
with her advanced macular degeneration.

  1. Is the content being cached and thus helping the SEO of the page
    from the panes that are not visible due to no functionality? Yes the
    content is in the source.

Then yes, it is helping.

  1. I am asking #2 as we have been making some really cool stuff
    using other actions that reveals content hides it and such but due
    to the fact that content is apparently controlled by javascript, non
    of it is cached by Google nor is it even visible. Your action seems
    to be providing what appears to be some level of Progressive
    Enhancement. Could you elaborate?

I have a nice article about progressive enhancement on the
ActionsForge site, you may want to read that. Basically, the idea is
that you layer behavior and cool browser tricks over the top of a
semantic structure, and that way everybody wins.

There are a couple of cases where my Actions actually remove content
from the page. The ScriptyFader for sure, and maybe one other, can’t
think of it off-hand, actually take content out of your page and cache
it in “fragment” partial files. These files are then injected back
into the page on demand. But because they are entirely missing, Google
(or Beverly) will only see them if you used the ScriptyFader Thumbnail
Action and created a link to the partial. Otherwise, since Google
doesn’t run JavaScript, and many screen readers don’t either, your
content is missing. It’s a trade-off, and you should design with it in
mind. Ultra-fast loading of a near-infinity of heavy resources < – >
Google can’t see it.

Walter

Regards, Dave


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Thank you for your input Walt,

Very interesting as I was under the understanding that Google was not caching the html content of a layer that has special behavior such as show and hide based on a click event. Others have suggested as you have that the content, since it is in the pages source code is being searched and that it is only an issue of the functionality being lost for users that don’t have javascript enabled.

Regards,
Dave


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Right. If you want to see what Google sees, try using a browser that
will let you disable JavaScript and images and stylesheets, and try
reading what you see. Or just View Source and try reading that. The
latter is closer to the truth. There are some algorithms in their
crawler which divine whether an element is visible, but those are
based on CSS and not JavaScript. So if it sees white on white, it
flags you as an idiot and a scammer, and puts your site on That List.
Likewise if an element is set to display:none in CSS. The trick here
is to do all such hiding using JavaScript that runs at page load. That
way the content is visible to Google and the un-scripted masses alike.

Walter

On May 4, 2011, at 3:00 PM, TeamSDA wrote:

Thank you for your input Walt,

Very interesting as I was under the understanding that Google was
not caching the html content of a layer that has special behavior
such as show and hide based on a click event. Others have suggested
as you have that the content, since it is in the pages source code
is being searched and that it is only an issue of the functionality
being lost for users that don’t have javascript enabled.

Regards,
Dave


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Fully get the black hat stuff, not something we would ever do. I have customers ask us to do this sort of thing thinking they are clever. This always results in a speech from us about SEO ethics and such.

Currently most show and hide functionality is accomplished using Freeway actions which I would assume is Java Script driven. Our only reason for this approach is to achieve a feature rich UI. Thank you for all your help in this post as we are diving in to this subject and trying to weigh out UI, SEO and PE.

Regards,
Dave


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