Question

The website I’m working on has a typical e-commerce product page, with the top part of the page containing the title, images and pricing, while the bottom part of the page has the tabs section, with tabs for Features, Specs, Accessories, Reviews and so on.

Naturally, this HTML Document is heavy. I think about splitting the page in two:

1. The HTML Document will contain only the top part of the page
2. Then JavaScript will call asynchronously another page, which contains a JSON object with the content of all the tabs; when successful – JavaScript will populate each tab with his content

The question is:
Will the Search Engines crawl the content that is loaded by JavaScript?
if not – then Progressive Rendering = Loss of SEO?
if yes – must I somehow ensure that all the tabs are populated prior to the Load event, or this doesn’t matter?

I think that this question could be asked differently:
With SEO in mind, do the Search Engines crawl the HTML Document only, or they crawl the content of the page at time when the Load event takes place?

Any known best practices for this? any useful links?

Please advise.

Answer 1

Crawlers dont use js. Turn off JS in your browser to see what the crawler does. If you have links to these content pages it will crawl to them. If the SEO is important, make sure its in the page.