Question

I know that this question has been asked many times ( but in different varuations), but I got totally confused…

I have a website with a right panel displaying some content – a set of links to news/inner articles.
This is the same list for all site’s pages.
Thus, every time there is a new link/line in th news section, I have to go manually over all site’s pages and update them. This is really annoying and time consuming.

The approach I though about is:

Adding a div where the news/link are supposed to be:

<div class"news"></div>

and load a JS file in all files. Upon window.onload(), what the JS will do is writing the news:

document.getElementByID('news').innerHTML=....

Thus, every time there is a new link/news, I will add it to the JS file, and it will be written in all site’s pages ( because they all will load this script).

My Question is:
Is this approach ok? Will the news/links that are generated this way be seen by (Goggle)?

P.S
I have read many articles e.g
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11989908/can-google-crawl-links-generated-on-the-clientside-e-g-knockout

Googlebot doesn't see jquery generated content

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=174992

Does google crawl javascript?

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

and more…. But got really confused…
I am not using any AJAX or server side programming.
Just want to do a simple .innerHTML ="..." with a predefined list of news, to save a lot of time. Will this content be indexed and seen by google?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Generally, no. Google (and other bots) will not see content that you add dynamically.

They are of course learning the search engine to understand more and more, and it probably recognises some specific ways to add content to the page already, but to be able to see any dynamic content it would have to actually execute the script in a sandboxed environment, or emulate the script execution, to find out what it does.

Even if it does see some dynamic content, it’s likely that it gives that content lower priority, so you are always better off by putting your important content as actual elements in the page.