Web Performance: SEO Mythbusting

People often find that their sales will go up, they'll get more engagement From audiences.

They didn't know they had just because they can now access the content Hello and welcome to another episode of SEO myth busting with me today Is Ada Rose Cannon and you're working for Samsung? Is that right? What do you do at Samsung? So for Samsung I'm a developer advocate for the web browser Samsung Internet.

Samsung Internet is a web browser for Android phones.

You can get it from the Play Store but not a lot of people have heard about it So there's lots what I do is trying to raise awareness but more importantly than that What I'm trying to do is advocate for the web as a platform to try and encourage developers to build for it and to Make sure it lasts long into the future as a great and healthy platform for people to build stuff with.

I love to have you here because I want to talk to you about the SEO Versus performance and usability on the web and I think we need to get some stuff out of the way, right? So will you say what is the most important bits and pieces that you would like people to focus on more when building web stuff? so I have a huge passion for ensuring that That the web remains great for everyone around the world.

Not just on people using the latest handsets and on desktop computers Because most people aren't people are using devices from years ago and low-end sub $100 devices where Frankly today, the the modern web is just not even reaching them.

There's a fantastic talk from Alex Russell Who goes into the the reality of people with phones that are less than $100? And yeah, that's a that's a fantastic one you'd have the naive thought that as time goes on that phones are getting steadily better and at a bottom of the line phone is Nowadays is just as good at the top of line phone four years ago, when they're not.

It's just getting wider and wider Wider the chasm is opening rather than anything else.

What was really awesome.

I heard recently Google was doing performance metrics into Into their ratings for search results, I don't So was this front-end web performance like render speed, making sure it's not janky, or is this just Making sure that a page loads really quickly? so it is a little.

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It's a it's a tricky one because we have so many metrics right.

We have Time to first bite, we have time to interactive, We have time to first meaningful paint and then you have like the frame rates and stuff.

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Now Googlebot which is the tool that basically fetches the data and renders your website for for Search Indexing We don't really interact that much with the page So we can't really get, like, figure out if your scroll is smooth on something like that, but we do get the rendering bits So we can tell you when the page becomes responsive to inputs, when the content is ready for the user to consume.

So we're looking at the blend of these kind of modes.

Yeah of performance.

Does that make sense? It does make sense.

So do you have any other qualms with like how SEO influences the daily work of a web developer? So a friend of mine recently rebuilt her site using React.

She was very excited about it and and seemed to get quite good to client side performance.

Once it all loaded.

Unfortunately when she sent it out to her company's Team to which does SEO analysis they came back with an answer of We love your site.

It's really good But you've basically don't appear in the rankings, even though she could show them that look right there It's on Google.

Is Google engaging with people who do SEO analysis to ensure that They're running up-to-date metrics the similar ones to Google to ensure that even a heavily client-side rendered page and They can feel confident that it is being measured well? So we can't really Fix what people are doing in terms of what they were tools.

they're using or something.

But what we do want is we want to open this black box of SEO for everyone.

So we're having this conversation web developers We're having this conversation with SEO and tool makers and we provide a bunch of metrics and tools as well.

So we have search console that gives you a bunch of insights and how you're doing in search so that you're not relying on someone else basically sticking the finger in the wind and Reading the stars and stuff.

and we also we also want to make sure that people are understanding that blanket statements like JavaScript's gonna kill your SEO or you cannot use React or Angular, that that's not necessarily the best way of doing it It's a really comfortable answer probably mmm.

It's not the right answer sometimes.

All right, so at Chrome Dev Summit, I saw your great talk on SEO in the web.

Thank you.

And one thing you mentioned was the the rendering for By Googlebot to actually process a JavaScript heavy site could take up to a week to happen.

Does this mean that JavaScript heavy sites are effectively getting penalized in Google Search results, right? They're not getting penalized so they are ranking just fine but the indexing stage is where the problem is because as you say we are processing by putting them first into a rendering queue and then eventually As we have the resources available We are rendering them and if the resources take a while to actually render That means that we cannot refresh the content in the index as quickly so News sites might want to look into that.

But then again you have usability issues anyways, right? Yes, right and that's because that's bad for the user we try to find search results that are good for the users and If a page takes ages to load that is not a good experience for me.

So you want to fix that because of the users not necessarily just because of the crawler.

So if a page is Built using, I know I have a bit of a bias against these JavaScript heavy front-end client-side Rendered pages because they're terrible for everyone who doesn't have like an iPhone or latest Pixel or something Yeah, or a desktop computer But anyway for these sites if the way they make their money is delivering fresh content daily Does this mean that the content in the search results may actually be like out of date for them? They might be lagging then Yes, absolutely.

And I think again like it's very important to get the users a great experience and I don't think you can do that when you are Heavily relying on client-side rendering because good Devices might be really old.

So yeah, one way of working around unless you want to Properly fix this and do hybrid rendering or server-side rendering, One way around of that is to do dynamic rendering and basically like give us a static rendered version of your page for the crawler.

So that we can index it quicker, but that's not making the user usability and user experience problems going So what do you say it's generally safer to rely more on on latest HTML and CSS? Knowing that they degrade more gracefully than JavaScript? Yes.

Don't speak if you look at the the tristar of Technology that we have in the web platform like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, HTML and CSS are just more resilient than JavaScript and so Relying on JavaScript too heavily is always gonna probably get you into trouble with certain ways and spotty network connections and stuff So I would say use polyfills, use progressive enhancement, use what the web platform offers you, and use JavaScript responsibly.

Yeah it's really great to hear especially from a Googler that like reducing reliance on JavaScript and Taking advantage of good HTML and CSS where it's available can can actually wonders for your SEO.

Absolutely.

Ada, thank you so much for being here and talking to me about performance and SEO and I do you have a feeling that SEO and web developers can work together nicer or is there still.

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? I think as long as the goals of what people are trying to accomplish are clear and we're not just like resorting to auguries, or looking at the stars, to work out what Google is thinking, then it's going to Enabled developers to actually build sites that make sense and take advantage of that platform.

Anything Google can do to ensure that the web works for everyone and not just in the wealthy Western web, then It'll be really really fantastic.

Fantastic closing words.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you This just in the next episode of SEO myth-busting is gonna be about SEO in the age of frameworks Jason Miller and I will talk about what that entails so stay tuned on this channel Subscribe to Google webmasters and see you soon.