Years ago, there existed a time when search engine bots never used to crawl or index web pages (website) dynamically created by JavaScript and CSS. The static HTML source code was all they could have a look at and it all seemed good and easy in the world of Webmasters. But of course, Google has always stuck to the Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution quite literally and has evolved itself into a bot that understands web pages by crawling its JavaScript and CSS files. This new update from Google got an apprehensive response from the Webmasters and the initial reaction was to block this crawling. The webmasters feared that the crawling of web pages used up unnecessary bandwidth and that it could affect their search engine rankings. The fresh twist in the plot came when Google updated its webmaster guidelines and warned them against blocking JavaScript or CSS files. The webmasters realized with shock that blocking the crawling could now do more harm than good to their indexing and search rankings. Now, if better rankings aren’t reason enough for you to allow Googlebot to crawl JavaScript and CSS files, please read on for more.
Lets Google fully understand the Website
The Googlebot is getting more human by the day and now wishes to get a human perspective of a website. Crawling JavaScript and CSS files helps them do this and fully understand the website. This makes sure that the user-experience remains optimized.
Looking to optimize your web page for smartphones too? A mobile-friendly design and layout isn’t enough to do that. Google needs to render and understand the web page fully to make sure that the page is mobile-friendly. Unless this happens, Google does not apply the mobile-friendly tag on your web page and this is important to get good search rankings on a mobile browser. So, allowing Googlebot to crawl your CSS and JavaScript files should give you that mobile-friendly boost your website needs.
There are a lot of web pages that stuff their content with keywords to improve rankings. And there are some sites which have a layout that focuses more on the ads than the actual content. But, a CSS and JavaScript expert could do the same and make it look otherwise. Crawling JavaScript and CSS files of web pages thus become important to make sure that this doesn’t happen.
It is quite clear that allowing Googlebot to crawl JavaScript and CSS is important for effective processing of your website. But the important thing is that this should be done without opening up your website to other security issues. The key is to figure out ways to allow Googlebot to crawl all JavaScript and CSS file and at the same time ensuring that the other core areas remain blocked.
