Google Bots: What They Can And Cannot Do

Have you ever wondered whether or not Google bots are crawling all of the links on your website? What about the images you use? Can these be recognized, and do they affect the search engine ranking of your site? Finally, is Google able to crawl JavaScript output�and if so, does this affect search engine ranking, as well?

Those are excellent questions, so here is the low-down on what Google can and (currently) cannot recognize by means of its crawlers:

Google bots crawl every link they are able to find. These crawlers are very sophisticated, as Google is highly interested in gathering as much data about your site as possible. You can learn how it interacts with your site by examining the log files kept on your server. Tools such as the log analyzer by Screaming Frog make it easy to parse through the data and see what has been crawled. For higher SEO ranking, your images should be original. They should also have good, descriptive alt img tags. As far as image quality goes, there is a trade-off: Although it is preferable to have a high quality photo, you also need to optimize your page for fast loading. It is important to have good alt img tags because these help your page move higher in the list of image search results on Google. Bear in mind that Google is not (currently) able to recognize image patterns. It can only compare the file names of your images (as well as surrounding text and alt img text) with other known images in its database. However, this is likely to change in the future as technology continues to become more and more sophisticated. Google is definitely able to crawl the content that is output by your JavaScript routines, provided these are set up properly. Therefore, JavaScript content can definitely have a bearing on the search engine ranking for your site.