Though web browsers are becoming more and more advanced, that doesn’t mean you should build websites that you know only the latest web browsers support, nor should you build websites that GoogleBot, Google’s web crawler, cannot fully crawl and index. That was the advice from Google’s John Mueller, when asked about Google’s status on modernizing GoogleBot to a more recent version of Chrome.
Be conservative. Mueller said it is of his opinion you should make your web pages “work with the status quo” of how GoogleBot currently crawls the web. He said it is best to do that than “rather than waiting for bigger changes, if you care for search.”
The tweet. Here are the tweets with the question and answer from John Mueller:
Why it matters. Google is a very important source of traffic to most websites on the internet. Because of that, you want to make sure that Google is fully able to crawl and index the content on your web pages. Without being able to crawl and index your web pages, there is a small chance that those web pages can rank in Google for the keywords people might search for to find your pages. So getting too fancy with your web pages, where Google is confused by them, can ultimately lead to the site not coming up in Google search.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.