Googlebot now supports latest Javascript features

Google announced at Google IO 2019 that Googlebot now supports the latest Javascript features. This is an important improvement for Frontend Developers.

This means that now we can develop Single Page Applications or use the latest browsers features like ES6, WebComponents, IntersectionObserver an so on.

Justin Fagnani

@justinfagnani

Googlebot now supports:

🧩 JS Modules
🧱 Custom Elements
🌚 Shadow DOM
🏫 Classes
🏷 Tagged Template Literals

IOW, it's ready for indexing super-modern web sites without compiling to ES5 or SSR! 🎉 twitter.com/googlewmc/stat…

00:39 AM - 08 May 2019

Google Webmasters @googlewmc

🤖 Meet the new evergreen Googlebot! 🤖 We've listened to your questions and feedback and brought modern Chromium to Googlebot - read more at our blog 👉https://t.co/nufYWOozBd

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There are some limitations, for example if you are using babel for transpiling your Javascript code, you should evaluate if it's necessary. Major Browsers supports many ES6 features like fetch, promise, classes, async & await, arrow functions and many others.

Google Index Javascript

To fix Javascript issues I leave you these links:

• Fix JS Limitations.
• Lazy Loading
• Implement Dynamic Rendering

Debugging

For debugging your pages there are two useful tools:

• Mobile Friendly Test
• Url Inspection Tool

Javascript SEO

Javascript SEO is a series of videos presented by Martin Splitt where you can find interesting advices.

Keep calm and code!

Comments

[Seanmclem]

It still won't prerender client side SPAs very well. So not terribly useful