Mastodawn

John Mueller Nov 15, 2022

With the migration to #Mastodon 4, your public profile pages & posts are now #JavaScript pages.

In terms of #SEO (I know, not everyone cares about being found in Google), this will likely mean that it'll take a bit longer for your posts to be findable, since they're linked from your profile page, and that page has to be rendered in order to see the links. Slower servers might have more trouble: indexing might time out before it sees the content. (more)

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John Mueller Nov 15, 2022

(trying this unlisted for the rest of the thread) If you want to test your pages, you can use Google's Mobile Friendly test: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly . It will try to show the page with a smartphone #Googlebot rendering it. Google uses smartphone rendering for almost all indexing now, so it's a good match. It's not perfect though (timeouts are shorter than for search).

Mobile-Friendly Test - Google Search Console

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John Mueller Nov 15, 2022

.. and if you run a server yourself, you can find out much more in Search Console. You can see reports for how things are being found & indexed, and can test pages specifically for indexability ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289?hl=en ). To get there, you need to verify ownership of your server first though. It's good to get this done early, you never know when you'll need it (you can do urgent URL removals there).

URL Inspection Tool - Search Console Help

About the URL Inspection report and test The URL Inspection tool provides information about Google's indexed version of a specific page, and also allows you to test whether a URL might be indexable.

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John Mueller Nov 15, 2022

And if you're curious about #JavaScript pages and #Google Search, we have a ton of material on what to watch out for and how to test. @geekonaut has put a ton of work into this, and is our #JavaScriptHero.

Start here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascript-seo-basics

Or videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKoqnv2vTMUPOalM1zuWDP9OQl851WMM9

#JavaScript is not a blocker for #SEO, but it's good to understand how it plays a role.

Understand JavaScript SEO Basics | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers

Discover how Google Search processes JavaScript and explore best practices for improving JavaScript web apps for Google Search.

Google for Developers

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John Mueller

... and random anecdote: Twitter's pages also used to be JavaScript based -- they moved to the "AJAX crawling scheme" (#! URLs / ?_escaped_fragment_= as URL parameters) at some point, which helped. Nowadays I think they have "traditional" HTML pages for search (but use a m-dot subdomain, which makes mobile indexing trickier).