Google Removes JavaScript SEO Warning, Says It’s Outdated via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

Google’s JavaScript SEO guidance has gotten narrower over the past year. The company recently removed its JavaScript and accessibility recommendations from its JavaScript SEO basics documentation, saying the advice was “out of date and not as helpful as it used to be.”

It’s the fifth update to that page since December, and each one has replaced broad cautions with specific technical advice.

What Google Removed

Google updated its JavaScript SEO basics page on March 4, removing a section that had advised developers to design pages for users who “may not be using a JavaScript-capable browser.”

The section, titled “Design for accessibility,” advised testing sites with JavaScript turned off or viewing them in text-only browsers like Lynx. It warned that viewing a site as text-only could reveal content “which may be hard for Google to see, such as text embedded in images.”

Google explained the removal in its documentation changelog:

“The information was out of date and not as helpful as it used to be. Google Search has been rendering JavaScript for multiple years now, so using JavaScript to load content is not ‘making it harder for Google Search’. Most assistive technologies are able to work with JavaScript now as well.”

The removal doesn’t mean accessibility stopped mattering. Google’s changelog specifically cited improvements in assistive technology as one reason the old guidance was outdated.

Why This Matters

Google published the JavaScript SEO basics page when JS rendering was still a known pain point for crawling and indexing. The page included several notes on ensuring Googlebot could process JavaScript content.

Then, Google said on its “Search Off The Record” podcast that it renders all web pages for search, including JavaScript-heavy sites.

This document update continues the pattern of moving away from warnings about JavaScript and toward specific technical advice.

Looking Ahead

You should still pay attention to how JavaScript-heavy pages perform in search. You can use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to verify what Googlebot sees after rendering.

Keep in mind that Google’s advancements to its own renderer don’t extend to other bots that might crawl your site. Other search engines and crawlers may not render pages the same way Google does.

SEJ STAFF Matt G. Southern Senior News Writer at Search Engine Journal

Matt G. Southern, Senior News Writer, has been with Search Engine Journal since 2013. With a bachelor’s degree in communications, ...