Google Details JavaScript Execution on Non-200 HTTP Statuses
▼ Summary
– Google updated its JavaScript SEO documentation to clarify how it handles pages with non-200 HTTP status codes.
– Pages with a 200 HTTP status code are always sent to Google’s rendering queue, regardless of JavaScript presence.
– Pages with a non-200 status code (like a 404 error) might be skipped by Google’s rendering process.
– This update is part of broader changes Google made to its JavaScript SEO documentation this week.
– Ensuring pages return a 200 status code is crucial to prevent Google from skipping rendering, which can harm search rankings.
Google has updated its official JavaScript SEO documentation to provide greater clarity on how its systems handle pages that do not return a standard 200 HTTP status code. This change is significant for webmasters and developers, as it directly impacts whether a page’s JavaScript will be executed and indexed by Google’s crawler. Understanding this technical nuance is crucial for ensuring content is properly discovered and ranked in search results.
The core update clarifies a specific technical behavior. Googlebot queues all pages with a 200 HTTP status code for rendering, regardless of whether JavaScript is present on the page. However, the process differs for error or redirect pages. If the HTTP status code is non-200, such as a 404 error page, rendering might be skipped entirely. In simpler terms, a page returning a “404 Not Found” or a “301 Redirect” may not have its JavaScript processed, which can affect how the page is understood and indexed.
This distinction is vital for SEO. When Google skips the rendering phase for a page, it typically relies on the initial HTML snapshot it receives. For a JavaScript-heavy page, this raw HTML might lack the fully rendered content, dynamic elements, or metadata that appear after scripts run. Consequently, if Google skips rendering, it will likely lead to poor ranking of that page in Google Search because the search engine cannot fully assess the page’s intended content and relevance.
The practical takeaway is clear: to ensure Googlebot fully processes and understands the content on your important web pages, you must verify they return a 200 OK status code. This applies to all pages you wish to be indexed, not just the homepage. For pages that should not be indexed, like true error pages, a non-200 status remains appropriate and can help guide Googlebot away from irrelevant content. This latest documentation refinement is part of a broader series of updates Google has made to its JavaScript SEO guidance, helping developers build more crawlable and indexable websites.
(Source: Search Engine Land)
