Yes, Googlebot Understands Code...

[goawayplease]

I thought this was an interesting article:
http://mashable.com/2010/06/25/google-javascript/

What does BHW think?

 

[ultimategamechain]

so its now ok even if our links is in javascript?

 

[trophaeum]

theyv been doing this for a LONG time now to detect cloaking and malware, nothing new here

 

[ahmedbin91]

I think there should be a great bot for making these google bot not inspect.

 

[trophaeum]

You can still do cloaking on server side, right? And google would never know, unless their employee visited your site.

if you get the code right they dont know but they have a LOT of heuristics they use to detect potential cloaking, lets just say most n00bs wont be able to cloak their site no matter what they do, iv managed to get cloaking working and not get banned but it always gets banned after enough time anyway

 

[goawayplease]

That's the nature of heuristics... it's always learning and always improving. I found it interesting that they claim to respect POST based forms, but will attempt to crawl GET content whenever possible.

Our resident SEO Analyst ipopbb tends to imply that Google doesn't call his external CSS or JS, so I wonder what the deal is with that... they can parse it, but how often DO they parse it?

if you get the code right they dont know but they have a LOT of heuristics they use to detect potential cloaking, lets just say most n00bs wont be able to cloak their site no matter what they do, iv managed to get cloaking working and not get banned but it always gets banned after enough time anyway

 

[trophaeum]

That's the nature of heuristics... it's always learning and always improving. I found it interesting that they claim to respect POST based forms, but will attempt to crawl GET content whenever possible.

Our resident SEO Analyst ipopbb tends to imply that Google doesn't call his external CSS or JS, so I wonder what the deal is with that... they can parse it, but how often DO they parse it?

your analyst is wrong, google fetches them, just not as often, they tend to pick them up more often on suspicious quality links or low quality (read: grammatical errors/too high keyword density etc) content

they also get them more often on brand new domains as a brand new domain is more likely to be an unknown quantity and may well be cloaking a lot more than an aged site would be

 

[minute80]

Bot does not interpret the whole JS code, since it would use too much CPU power. It just interprets certain portions of it to detect malware, redirects and similar as other in this thread have said, but it will avoid running any type of CPU intensive tasks.

Regarding Flash, only recently ago did G entered a partnership with Adobe to support Flash better. The state now is that it can read into string variables embedded into swf's, but it will avoid complex functions too.

 

[bdtyrone]

This is just the start. Next Google will even index download-able file's size.

 

[hendricius]

Web technologies are going forward and Google has to go with them... They also read links in PDF files etc...

 

[trophaeum]

Bot does not interpret the whole JS code, since it would use too much CPU power. It just interprets certain portions of it to detect malware, redirects and similar as other in this thread have said, but it will avoid running any type of CPU intensive tasks.

Regarding Flash, only recently ago did G entered a partnership with Adobe to support Flash better. The state now is that it can read into string variables embedded into swf's, but it will avoid complex functions too.

actually google can and does decode and run the js script entirely, i have had a bunch of sites with HUGE amounts of js as a test to try to stop goog reading it looking for redirects etc and its found them, it tries to avoid heavy cpu crunching, sure, but if its heurs detect something weird, they will spend the cpu time to check into it to ban you

 

[ipopbb]

I don't see this in my logs... Googlebot doesn't request my .js or my .css files...

this is news to me... can you post a .js access googlebot User-Agent line for your logs? I'd love to know the version number thats running JS.