A certain rumor started circulating a week ago about how Google is now capable of indexing rendered Javascript. I received a notification from a customer of ours. My immediate reaction was skepticism and then optimism. If any company could pull that trick off it’d be Google. However, our own @jonnyjon did some research on this and it turns out that the claims, while accurate, are not precise. Here’s what Jon found.
- Google is not currently indexing Echo stream client content (which is how we built all of our products at realtidbits)
- Google is indexing Facebook comments when the comment widget is embedded via <iframe> or XFBML (which creates a dynamic iframe)
- When you embed the Facebook comments widget via iframe or XFBML setting the content is rendered within an iframe as HTML not dynamic javascript AJAX
- I don’t see any evidence that Google is in fact indexing Facebook comments served up via AJAX only static html that is rendered from an iframe
- Google’s recent statement that they “can now index some dynamic comments” is true but very misleading they can only crawl javascript that creates a dynamic iframe
- Displaying echo in an iframe was debated a while back but eventually rejected in light of backplane and having multiple widgets on a page all work together.


