When the source code of a page does not appear in HTML format, search engines have a difficult time scanning any information and links that appear. Multimedia and interactive content are affected by this, but not exclusively. As Google Image Search has become more and more integrated into its algorithms, this has somewhat improved.
With HTML5, web developers can add multimedia content to basic coding without sacrificing crawlability. Consequently, some sites switched to HTML5 in place of Javascript, Java, AJAX, and Flash. Nonetheless, recent tests have shown that Google’s crawling capability of these dynamic formats has improved as well.
An aesthetically pleasing website can be enhanced by utilizing these technologies to provide eye-catching content beyond traditional text. In addition, as Google’s spiders are able to crawl your site, it’s important to pair these external links with relevant, well-researched internal links.
Javascript and Java
The two technologies aren’t actually related, despite their similar names. Javascript is often embedded on pages (for example, Facebook comments are submitted with Javascript) and is increasingly visible to search engine spiders, with spiders being able to follow link redirects within Javascript.
It is unhelpful to include too much Javascript, and some web crawlers do not index content containing that coding. As such, all links and redirects must be presented in simple HTML format, and no content should be hidden behind the “Read More” buttons.
However, Javascript is a more simple coding language, and it has a lot fewer discrete functions than Java. The content of a Java console is totally invisible to search engine crawlers if it has no keywords in its alt text, as you would for an image. The text content of your Java pages can also be transcribed as an HTML transcript, much like an audio transcript, for the purpose of enhanced search visibility.
AJAX
As AJAX changes the content of a page without changing the URL, it causes even more problems. It is therefore not indexed by search engines. AJAX-enhanced pages were indexed by Google in 2009, but they were no longer recommended in 2015.
Tests have demonstrated that Google is still able to crawl these pages. Your agency will be able to provide you with new URLs for your different versions of content, and standard HTML redirects to them so that your website will be indexed comprehensively while still implementing AJAX.
Flash
In the past, Flash was able to grab a user’s attention almost instantly as a result of its eye-catching animations. However, Google also doesn’t pay attention to Flash-based websites. Flash animations cannot be indexed by search engines because they are not able to ‘guess’ their content, and as a result, their text will not be indexed.
Videos and images are beginning to be recognized by search spiders as search technology continues to evolve. As of now, spiders are able to read images found in unspiderable content through optical character recognition (OCR).
Google Image Search has improved so that instead of relying solely on alt text or written descriptions, pictures can now be matched by their content, not just their alt text. The first real sign of Google’s departure from a purely HTML-based search engine, this recognition of increasingly complex shapes and colors are impressive.
