Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt recently debunked the notion that JavaScript SEO is dying.
It’s certainly not dying, nor is it getting easier. If anything, JavaScript SEO is only going to get more technical as issues become more challenging to identify.
This topic was brought up in a Google Webmaster Central hangout during a discussion about evergreen Googlebot.
A site owner was under the impression that JavaScript SEO is dying because Googlebot is getting better at rendering it.
Here’s is a summary of what both Mueller and Splitt had to say about this during their 6-7 minute discussion on the topic.
John Mueller’s Take
While it’s true that Googlebot is always improving, Mueller says there’s still so many things that can go wrong with JavaScript when it comes to SEO.
It takes a lot of experience to be able to debug and figure out how to improve things. Like regular SEO, there are ways to do things that work well and other ways that work terribly.
Technical SEO is already challenging, so when you add JavaScript into the mix it won’t be a trivial task to debug errors that are impacting rankings.
Martin Splitt’s Take
Splitt says it’s “naive” to think JavaScript SEO is any less important now that Googlebot is up-to-date with the latest version of Chrome.
Right now, JavaScript SEO is about finding the pitfalls and the “gotchas” in today’s technology and working around them. It the future it will be more about understanding what could go wrong.
Yes, JavaScript will work better out of the box, but it will be paramount to understand all the things that could go wrong with it. The future of JavaScript SEO will revolve around debugging and troubleshooting.
When developers are building a website in JavaScript they’re not concerned about getting it indexed in Google, their priority is to build a functional website.
With that said, Splitt makes a passionate plea to developers and SEOs to sit down at the same table and figure out the optimal ways to build things together.
You can hear the full discussion on JavaScript SEO in the video below, starting at the 36-minute mark: