Industry discussion

"Brilliant and interactive piece or reporting from Sitebulb! Definitely worth reading especially if your site relies heavily on SEO."

Nicolas Monti-Potsolakis of NMP Consulting

"The Javascript angle is becoming much more prominent. It can be a force for good, but [this report] shows most SEOs are a bit lost at sea."

Dixon Jones, InLinks

"SEOs used to scream in terror when discovering a website was made with JavaScript. Some SEOs today still swear that search engines don't render JS, and the statistics in this report show that 41.6% of the survey takers hadn't even read Google's documentation on JS rendering. All this is to say that, as an industry, we need to level up our understanding of JS and how to optimize websites to utilize it best. JS isn't going away anytime soon."

Nick LeRoy, Nick LeRoy Consulting LLC

"I think there's a lot of confusion around if JavaScript SEO matters; I've often seen debates on Twitter whether as a concept it should exist or not. I think conversations like that have made JavaScript a more confusing aspect of SEO. If someone you might look up to in the industry is saying it's not a thing then why should someone look into it. But it very much is a concern for us. I think this report does great at showing us that it's important and a huge portion of SEO practitioners are auditing/optimizing JavaScript on a regular basis."

Billie Geena Hyde, RankSuite

"Some days you read a stat like smelling salts: '41.6% of SEOs [in the survey] said they definitely hadn't read or weren't sure if they'd read Google's documentation around JavaScript rendering.' My eyes are watering. The sentence before that proudly declared 94.4% of respondents said understanding what content Googlebot sees when crawling websites is critical! (Is rendering the equivalent of flossing!? You know it's important but nah?) It was the third stat that broke me: '10.6% of SEOs said they perfectly understand how Google crawls, renders & indexes JavaScript.' ...This report, published by Sitebulb and featuring Arnout Hellemans, Aleyda Solís & Samantha Torres, walks through the state of JavaScript SEO. My favorite bit is the recap of the top JS Hints triggered in the tool."

Jamie Indigo, Not a Robot

"One of the primary challenges of Google’s documentation on JS rendering is that it seems squarely aimed at developers, when it should ideally meet the needs of two very different key stakeholders: developers AND SEOs. It should explain things in both “languages,” while finding a way to bridge the gap between them. It’s a daunting task, for sure, and the current approach leaves a lot to be desired. At Gray Dot, we find that using this documentation doesn’t put us much closer to being on the same page in terms of what’s needed for SEO and why — even when working with highly experienced developers. If senior developers and 15+ year SEOs can’t connect the dots, it’s a good sign these resources are falling short."

Tory Gray of Gray Dot Co

"It's seductive to only look at webpages in their complete rendered form. Even Google's own tools, such as Inspect URL in Search Console and the Rich Results test, use the fully rendered version of a submitted webpage. Yet this provides an incomplete picture of a page's performance on the web. Strip out a page's client-side JavaScript and see what's left - that's the first version of the page that every crawler on the web (including Googlebot) sees. Rendering is not a swift, nor a faultless process. So many things can go wrong, and it's wise to avoid relying on client-side code for critical page content."

Barry Adams of Polemic Digital

"[Google's documentation] was made for developers by developers, that much is very clear. But based on my experience, developers AREN'T reading them."

Ed Caraballo, Seer Interactive