Does Javascript Affect Ranking?
Client Centers Network
----------
Does Javascript Affect Ranking?
by: Jon Ricerca
Almost all SEO's agree that using too much javascript can harm your
rankings and might confuse the search engines. Is it true? We decided
to answer this extremely simple question for the two leading search
engines using a simple statistical analysis.
The methodology: I gathered the results of the queries that were
naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using the
two leading search engines and analyzed them. I had to visit each page
and check the HTML source code to see if javascript was being used. I
counted the number of pages found that utilized javascript for the
first 8 rankings. The results for each of the two leading search
engines were kept separate so that we could discover any differences
between the two leading search engines for this factor.
The resulting graphs show the number of pages utilizing javascript for
each ranking. The Y-axis shows the number of pages found utilizing
javascript, while the X-axis shows rankings 1 through 8. Here are the
graphs for each of the two leading search engines:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dcy02.jpg
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dcg02.jpg
The result is very conclusive and very surprising. Both leading search
engines rank pages that utilize javascript higher than pages that do
not utilize javascript. This is another example of how the guesses of
the SEO community are often just that... guesses... They have a 50%
chance of being correct on any particular factor. In this case, the
majority of the SEO community guessed wrong.
Notes:
1. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I
merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and
three associates during the month.
Conclusion:
Pages which utilize javascript rank higher than pages that do not
utilize javascript on both of the leading search engines.
This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from
this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain
this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the
factor we studied, but the end result is that these search engines do,
in fact, rank pages with javascript higher than pages without
javascript in the study.
About The Author
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and authors of the Search
Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com. For
access to the other SERF reports, please visit:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com