On June 18th, we held an in-depth webinar on the topic of Rendering SEO.
You can now watch it for free on YouTube.
Rendering SEO Manifesto
For over 20 years, SEO was focused on providing a website with more organic traffic by improving its prominence in search results of search engines.
The assumption made by the SEO community was always that indexing unique, valuable content is in the best interest of search engines and that they only exclude spam, worthless or harmful content from their indices. Evidence shows that this has now changed and a shift in the SEO paradigm must follow.
To better understand the problem, we should first outline why search engines are forced to skip indexing some web pages or parts thereof and how they deal with this issue.
- The internet is vast and it’s growing rapidly. There are over 130 trillion documents online.
- Web pages vary in their quality and it’s in the best interest of search engines to prioritize indexing and displaying pages with superior quality. Low-quality pages may never get indexed when they compete with pages of superior quality.
- Because of the widening range of functional and visual features available on the web platform, websites extensively use JavaScript and other heavy resources, such as images and videos. According to the HTTP Archive statistics, CSS files are now 7x heavier and JavaScript files 4x heavier on average when compared to 2011. This forces search engines to optimize their crawling, rendering and indexing process in a way that enables them to save resources.
- Google, the world’s largest search engine, is partially rendering, and indexing, a large portion of web pages, focusing on elements that the algorithm decides are crucial to users. For example, the main content element of a blog post may be rendered and indexed, while a section linking to similar blog posts isn’t. While it’s beneficial to the search engine in that it helps save resources, it may often negatively impact the visibility of a website in the search engine. This problem applies to all websites, regardless of whether they heavily use JavaScript and other heavy resources or not.
- New web content is getting indexed with a significant delay as search engines spend their resources to render and index other pages.
What needs to change?
As rendering is both necessary to understand and evaluate content of web pages and a costly step in the process of mapping the web by search engines, we believe that one of the primary focal points of technical search engine optimization should be improving the process and outcome of rendering web pages so that they can be easily accessible both for users to interact with and for search engines to index and display in the search results.
- Search engine optimization should be a holistic process. Rendering a web page is strictly connected to its crawling, indexing and ranking. If either of these processes fails, other SEO efforts won’t pay off.
- As Google (and, likely, other search engines) evaluate the importance and quality of a web page based on its layout, a search-optimized web page should have its rendering process streamlined so that the layout isn’t affected if the page is partially rendered by a search engine.
- We need to understand JavaScript SEO better. JavaScript is extremely popular; there is a high probability that at least one of their clients has a JavaScript website. SEO specialists don’t need to learn to code. They need to understand it on a conceptual level and be able to answer basic questions: “What changes does JavaScript cause to a page? Is Google able to index it?” Websites that use layout-affecting JavaScript features (such as infinite scroll) should be optimized so that search engines can access and understand their layout and content properly.
- Google, the most popular search engine, should more clearly communicate its ability of rendering and indexing web pages on a large scale, in a more informative and actionable fashion. It’s a topic that is commonly overlooked, yet crucial to a website’s visibility in search results.
- We need to focus our efforts on reducing the rendering cost of websites. Making a website faster has a positive impact both on user experience and the search engines’ rendering process.
This manifesto is inspired by findings outlined in "Rendering SEO Manifesto - Why we need to go beyond JavaScript SEO".
© 2020 Tomek Rudzki &
Bartosz Góralewicz &
Onely