Question

155

Noscript Tag, JavaScript Disabled Warning and Google Penalty

rated 0 times [ 161] [ 6] / answers: 1 / hits: 28172 / 15 Years ago, sun, june 14, 2009, 12:00:00

I have been using a noscript tag to show a warning when users have JavaScript disabled or are using script blocking plugins like Noscript. The website will not function properly if JavaScript is disabled and users may not figure out why it is not working without the warning.

After the latest Google algorithm shuffle, I have seen the daily traffic drop to about 1/3 of what it was in the previous months. I have also seen pages that were ranking #1 or #2 in the SERPS drop out of the results. After doing some investigating in webmaster tools, I noticed that JavaScript is listed as #16 in the keywords section. This makes no sense because the site has nothing to do with JavaScript and the only place that word appears is in the text between the noscript tags.

It seems that Google is now including and indexing the content between the noscript tags. I don't believe that this was happening before. The warning is three sentences. I'd imagine that having the same three sentences appearing at the top of every single page on the site could have a damaging effect on the SEO.

Do you think this could be causing a problem with SEO? And, is there any other method to provide a warning to users who have JavaScript disabled in a way that won't be indexed or read by search engines?

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answered 15 Years ago destiniemartinac · Accepted Answer

Somebody on another forum mentioned using an image for the warning. The way I see it, this would have three benefits:

There wouldn't be any irrelevant text for search engines to index.

The code to display a single image is less bulky than a text warning (which gets loaded on every page).

Tracking could be implemented to determine how many times the image is called, to give an idea of how many visitors have JavaScript disabled or blocked.

If you combine this with something like the non-noscript technique mentioned by J-P, it seems to be the best possible solution.