Why Google delays indexing Javascript content and what you can do to deal with it

While Google may be getting better at indexing Javascript content, it turns out that it still takes quite a while in some cases. In this article on SEJournal, Tomek Rudzki presents eye-opening data on the average time Googlebot needs to index JS content on high profile sites by studying the sitemap for changes and suggests some steps you can take to deal with it.

This is relevant for anyone who has a site with content in which indexing can make or break impact i.e news website or ecommerce store.

What can you do about it as a Product Manager or a Digital Marketer?

Here’s what he suggests:

  1. Use a tool like Onely to identify the content generated by Javascript on a page.
  2. Use the ‘site:’ command on Google to check for pages that it is indexing.
  3. Take a sample of URLs created a short while ago and search in Google with ‘site:{URL} “{fragment}”. 

This will help you understand if Google is indexing your JS content in a timely fashion or whether it is even indexing the content at all.

If you don’t check for this issue, you could see a major drop in organic traffic.