Source-Ordered Code now that Googlebot does a full render?

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Source-Ordered Code now that Googlebot does a full render?

ergophobe

7:20 pm on Jan 7, 2015 (gmt 0)

Now that Googlebot renders pages in a headless browser that fully renders pages similar to Chrome, does the order of code make any difference anymore?

I ask because I just got a query from someone with a top-of-page toolbar that shows in Facebook and in SERPS.

When I look, the toolbar DIV comes right after the <body> tag.

In the past, I would be confident that if you

1. placed the code at the bottom just before the </body>
2. made it display:none on page load and used window.onload or the document.ready() event to show it

You could be confident that Google would correctly parse this as unimportant content. Now I think it's a little less obvious.

Has anyone had things previously devalued using Source-Ordered Code start popping up in SERPs since Googlebot started behaving as a headless modern browser?

aristotle

1:27 am on Jan 9, 2015 (gmt 0)

top-of-page toolbar that shows in Facebook and in SERPS.

I'm not sure what that means

As for your question, maybe you could get around the problem by using <main> ... </main> tags to designate the important content

phranque

1:38 am on Jan 9, 2015 (gmt 0)

top-of-page toolbar that shows in Facebook and in SERPS.

I'm not sure what that means

it means FB is showing the top toolbar as the page preview when that url is shared as a link and google has selected the top toolbar as the most relevant content for the SERP description snippet.

aristotle

12:12 pm on Jan 9, 2015 (gmt 0)

Thanks phranque
It sounds like this might be another example of Google replacing your meta description with its own poorly-chosen snippet, thereby mis-representing to searchers what the page is really about. In my opinion this is one worst things Google does.

ergophobe

4:25 pm on Jan 9, 2015 (gmt 0)

using <main> ... </main>

I should say that this is not my site and even the person who asked me may be very limited in terms of changing the code.

The problem is that the site has a structure like this
<body>
..<header>
..<div class="main">
..<footer>

The person who rolled out the toolbar made it a peer element with those. My recommendation was to put it either in <footer> or just before the closing body tag, or failing that, in the <header> and, in any case make it load only when the document.ready() or the window.onload event fired.

I guess my question was, now that Google does a full render and supposedly knows the actual position of an element on the rendered page, not just in code, is there still any advantage to putting it in the footer?

Of course, for additional resources (scripts, large images or media files) there's an advantage to late or lazy loading, but this is just HTML that is on the page and part of the DOM.

Or put another way, does position in the HTML make much difference anymore?

aristotle

4:43 pm on Jan 9, 2015 (gmt 0)

I thought the question was how to prevent Google from showing the toolbar in the SERPs description while still using source-ordered code.

<body>
..<header>
.. including toolbar code
</header>

<main>
...main content
</main>

..<footer>
...footer content
..</footer>

..</body>

ergophobe

11:21 pm on Jan 9, 2015 (gmt 0)

That's what I was asking, or more generally I was asking whether the new way that Google renders pages before indexing has made Source Ordered Content less useful for Google SEO.

aristotle

1:22 am on Jan 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

Well as I tried to say earlier, my suggestion is to use the <main> tags to tell Google which part of the page contains the main content. Then instead of using the toolbar as the descriptive snippet in its search results, they might use a snippet chosen from within the main content. I don't know if it would work or not, but just saying that it might be worth a try.

seoskunk

3:41 am on Jan 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

I don't think onsite semantics make that much difference to be honest, I tried it doesn't work. Correcting errors is WMT doesn't work either. So what does work.......?

Being a corporate brand works, then you can put any old coding up.

ergophobe

4:02 am on Jan 10, 2015 (gmt 0)

@aristotle

they probably can't do that, but they might be able get the toolbar into the <header>. I'll probably tell them to try whichever is easiest - inside the <header> or all the way at the bottom of the code and, if it doesn't work, then more drastic methods.

@seoskunk
Actually, this site is a pretty strong brand within it's space - #1 or #2 for most relevant terms.

This is a question about how Google parses HTML now that they do a full render on a headless browser before indexing. It's not about who ranks and who doesn't.