I\'ve been developing the client-side for my web-app in JavaScript. The JavaScri

Question

I've been developing the client-side for my web-app in JavaScript.

The JavaScript can communicate with my server over REST (HTTP)[JSON, XML, CSV] or RPC (XML, JSON).

I'm writing writing this decoupled client in order to use the same code for both my main website and my PhoneGap mobile apps.

However recently I've been worrying that writing the website with almost no static content would prevent search-engines (like Google) from indexing my web-page.

I was taught about this restriction about 4 years ago, which is why I'm asking here, to see if this restriction is still in-place.

Does heavy JavaScript use adversely impact Googleability?

Explanation / Answer

Google (and I suspect Bing as well) have gotten much better at reading and indexing text found in JavaScript elements during the past 3-5 years or so. They do this for two reasons. First, to provide better indexing of content for users and, second, to detect and thwart various spamming techniques.

The problem is that you may not get indexed as well as you would like for the keywords you want or for long tail combos that may be valuable. Let's say that your topic was on dog training supplies. You might be able to rank for dog training supplies if your incoming links were good and other on-page elements fit the search engines' statistical profiles. However, since you have content for "German Shepard training supplies" or "Great Dane training supplies" buried inside a lot of replaceable text, you might not rank as easily for these terms. There are some ways to manage this but the best strategy will depend on specifics for your site.

Another thing to consider is that splitting off content into standard and mobile sections can cause ranking problems as well. Make sure that you use the canonical tag to indicate that your standard page is the one that should be considered the primary source. This avoids duplicate content filtering and possible penalties associated with the recent Google Panda update.

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