While I too couldn't comment on the actual JavaScript they put in place for the test and how it might have impacted other factors I just wanted to make a quick comment on the idea of a page speed penalty.
1. I have never in my life seen evidence of this happening before (enterprise consultant in this field). I am positive in my mind that it was not a case of "page is faster = drop in rankings".
I would be willing to bet that it had a lot more to do with the "rendering content in JS" which has traditionally been a huge issue for search engines (despite what they claim).
But every single time I have seen someone claim this or something like this there has been many other factors at play.
2. It is highly likely that the amount of impact that any given variable (in this case pagespeed) is not the same across the board. In fact it is much more aligned with the kinds of industries you are in and the keywords relating to that search.
As an example page speed is MUCH more likely to be a bigger factor for an e-commerce website and keywords showing any kind of transactional intent than it would be for someone looking for detailed information on a medical condition for example.*
*This isn't a confirmed fact that I know of at all but it seems to be a relatively well established theory in some more advanced SEO circles I believe.
The main issue with JS and SEO is that most JS Frameworks we are talking about are used to create SPAs (Single Page Applications). Usability-wise, these are great; everybody hates page loads. SEO-wise, there is a problem because the search engines can’t see all the HTML because everything is being rendered client side.
Basically, with a traditional web page written in PHP, the HTML is constructed from a template. The template spits out HTML from the server to the client. Every time you click a new link to load a new page, it’s delivered to your client via a GET request (EDIT: Your client/browser "asks" for the file from the server, the server sends the requested document back to the client).
With a SPA, JS is doing some DOM manipulation, and you’re not making round-trips to the server to display new content. For example, if you were to look at the source of a SPA written in Angular, you might see some <div ng-view> </div> elements, but almost no actual html. The web crawlers would see something similar.
There are several tactics for circumventing this issue, and Im curious if the Pintrest team considered them during this experiment. Anybody on the team here?
I agree with you that this definitely a rendering content in JS problem.
Most of the SEO experiments with increasing page speed from bad to average or great have shown a very small increase in rankings. We're talking one small signal in the whole algorithm. In this case, trying to go from average or good page speed to great page speed just for rankings is quite foolish.
If they want page speed to be the best it can be, and they absolutely must render the whole page in JS, they should have at least tried to use PhantomJS or something else to render the page properly for googlebot.
There's always the traditional options that can increase speed: minimize the amount of JS, increase the quality of JS written, less HTTP requests, proper DB calls, image sizing, proper caching, etc.
Comments
While I too couldn't comment on the actual JavaScript they put in place for the test and how it might have impacted other factors I just wanted to make a quick comment on the idea of a page speed penalty.
1. I have never in my life seen evidence of this happening before (enterprise consultant in this field). I am positive in my mind that it was not a case of "page is faster = drop in rankings".
I would be willing to bet that it had a lot more to do with the "rendering content in JS" which has traditionally been a huge issue for search engines (despite what they claim).
But every single time I have seen someone claim this or something like this there has been many other factors at play.
2. It is highly likely that the amount of impact that any given variable (in this case pagespeed) is not the same across the board. In fact it is much more aligned with the kinds of industries you are in and the keywords relating to that search.
As an example page speed is MUCH more likely to be a bigger factor for an e-commerce website and keywords showing any kind of transactional intent than it would be for someone looking for detailed information on a medical condition for example.*
*This isn't a confirmed fact that I know of at all but it seems to be a relatively well established theory in some more advanced SEO circles I believe.
The main issue with JS and SEO is that most JS Frameworks we are talking about are used to create SPAs (Single Page Applications). Usability-wise, these are great; everybody hates page loads. SEO-wise, there is a problem because the search engines can’t see all the HTML because everything is being rendered client side.
Basically, with a traditional web page written in PHP, the HTML is constructed from a template. The template spits out HTML from the server to the client. Every time you click a new link to load a new page, it’s delivered to your client via a GET request (EDIT: Your client/browser "asks" for the file from the server, the server sends the requested document back to the client).
With a SPA, JS is doing some DOM manipulation, and you’re not making round-trips to the server to display new content. For example, if you were to look at the source of a SPA written in Angular, you might see some <div ng-view> </div> elements, but almost no actual html. The web crawlers would see something similar.
There are several tactics for circumventing this issue, and Im curious if the Pintrest team considered them during this experiment. Anybody on the team here?
Angular.js, courtesy of Google.
I agree with you that this definitely a rendering content in JS problem.
Most of the SEO experiments with increasing page speed from bad to average or great have shown a very small increase in rankings. We're talking one small signal in the whole algorithm. In this case, trying to go from average or good page speed to great page speed just for rankings is quite foolish.
If they want page speed to be the best it can be, and they absolutely must render the whole page in JS, they should have at least tried to use PhantomJS or something else to render the page properly for googlebot.
There's always the traditional options that can increase speed: minimize the amount of JS, increase the quality of JS written, less HTTP requests, proper DB calls, image sizing, proper caching, etc.