I wonder what this means for SEO? If they are actually fully rendering pages in javascript I guess that means you have to be a lot more careful about how pages are laid out.
This definitely is important in terms of how much "value" Google assigns to links on the page, if they can identify where they render. They got a patent for varying the amount of page rank that flows to a link based on how likely the "reasonable surfer" is to click it. So in terms of flowing Pagerank to a bunch of high value landing pages via a slew of footer links, it's game over.
My only question is how frequently Googlebot actually renders the full JavaScript. Surely they don't have the computing resources to render it on every crawl.
Surely they don't have the computing resources to render it on every crawl.
Why do you think this? They had the computing resources to randomly generate billions of mutations of compiled Flash programs to find bugs in the Flash VM.
They seem to have been doing this for a while, google bot was running a tracking js that gets dynamically loaded and communicates to an iframe using postMessage which then sends ajax. If it is doing that, you would assume it's doing most of everything a browser does now.
My only question is how frequently Googlebot actually renders the full JavaScript. Surely they don't have the computing resources to render it on every crawl.
Link to patent discussion: http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer...