ADA ROSE CANNON: 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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARTIN SPLITT: Hello, and welcome to another episode
of "SEO Mythbusting."
With me, today, is at Ada Rose Cannon.
And you were working for Samsung, is that right?
ADA ROSE CANNON: That's correct.
MARTIN SPLITT: So what do you do at Samsung?
ADA ROSE CANNON: So, for Samsung,
I'm a developer advocate for the web browser Samsung Internet.
MARTIN SPLITT: Oh!
ADA ROSE CANNON: Samsung Internet
is a web browser for Android phones.
You can get it from the Play Store,
but not a lot people have heard about it.
So there's-- a lot what I do is trying to raise awareness.
MARTIN SPLITT: Makes sense.
ADA ROSE CANNON: 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.
MARTIN SPLITT: I love to have you
here because I want to talk to you about the SEO
versus for performance and usability on the web.
And I think we need to get some stuff out of the way, right?
So would you say--
what is the most important bits and pieces
that you would like people to focus on more
when building web stuff?
ADA ROSE CANNON: So I have a huge passion for ensuring that
the web remains great for everyone around the world,
not just on people using the latest handset 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 modern web is just not even reaching them.
MARTIN SPLITT: There's a fantastic talk
from Alex Russell, who goes into the reality of people
with phones that are less than $100.
ADA ROSE CANNON: I love that, though.
MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, that's a fantastic one.
ADA ROSE CANNON: You'd have the naive thought that,
as time goes on, phones are getting steadily better
and a bottom-of-the-line phone is, nowadays,
is just as good as the top of the line phone four years ago,
when they're not.
MARTIN SPLITT: It's not.
ADA ROSE CANNON: It's just getting wider and wider--
MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah, exactly.
ADA ROSE CANNON: --and wider.
MARTIN SPLITT: The chasm is opening, rather than
anything else.
ADA ROSE CANNON: What was really awesome, I heard recently,
Google was doing performance metrics
into their ratings for search results.
MARTIN SPLITT: Yeah.
ADA ROSE CANNON: And so was this front-end web performance,
like render speed, making sure it's not janky?
Or is this just making sure a page loads really quickly?
MARTIN SPLITT: Mm-hm.
So it is a little--
I think it's a tricky one because we
have so many metrics.
Right?
We have time to first byte, we have time to interactive,
we have time to first meaningful paint,
and then you have the frame rates and stuff.
Now, Googlebot, which is the tool that basically fetches
the data and renders your website 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 a blend of these kind of modes
of performance.
ADA ROSE CANNON: Cool.
MARTIN SPLITT: Does that make sense?
ADA ROSE CANNON: It does make sense.
MARTIN SPLITT: So do you have any other qualms
with like how SEO influences the daily work of a web developer?
ADA ROSE CANNON: So a friend of mine recently rebuilt her site
using React.
She was very excited about it and seemed
to get quite good 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 basically don't appear in the rankings,
even though she could show them that, look, right there,
it's on Google.
MARTIN SPLITT: Ooh, all right.
ADA ROSE CANNON: Is Google engaging
with people who do SEO analysis to ensure that they're
running up-to-date metrics?
MARTIN SPLITT: Mm-hmm.
ADA ROSE CANNON: The similar ones to Google
to ensure that, even a heavily client-side rendered page,
they can feel confident that it is being measured well.
MARTIN SPLITT: So we can't really
fix what people are doing in terms of what tools
they are 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
with web developers.
We're having this conversation with SEOs and tool makers,
and we provide a bunch of metrics and tools as well.
So we have a Search Console that gives you
a bunch of insights on how you were 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 want to make sure that people are understanding
that blanket statements like, "JavaScript is going to kill
your SEO," or, "you cannot use React or Angular,"
that's not necessarily the best way of doing it.
It's a really comfortable answer, probably,
but it's not the right answer, sometimes.
ADA ROSE CANNON: All right.
So that Chrome Dev Summit, I saw your great talk on SEO
in the web.
MARTIN SPLITT: Thank you.
ADA ROSE CANNON: And one thing you mentioned
was 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?
MARTIN SPLITT: Right.
They are 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 new sites might want to look into that.
But, then again, you have usability issues anyways,
right?
ADA ROSE CANNON: Yes.
MARTIN SPLITT: Right, and that's because that's
bad for the user.
We try to find the 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.
ADA ROSE CANNON: So if that page is built using--
I know I have a bit of a bias against these JavaScript-heavy
front-end client rendered pages because they're
terrible for everyone who doesn't have, like,
an iPhone or latest Pixel or something
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
might actually be like out of date for them?
MARTIN SPLITT: They might be lagging then.
Yes, absolutely.
And I think, again, like it's really 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 the--
ADA ROSE CANNON: I agree strongly.
MARTIN SPLITT: The 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 give us the static rendered version of your page
for the crawler so that we can index you quicker,
but that's not making the usability and user experience
problems go away.
ADA ROSE CANNON: Yeah.
So would you say it's generally safer to rely more
on latest HTML and CSS, knowing that they degrade more
gracefully than JavaScript?
MARTIN SPLITT: Yes.
Yes.
Generally speaking, if you look at 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 is.
So relying on JavaScript too heavily
is always going to probably get you
into trouble with certain ways in supporting
network connections and stuff.
So I would say use polyfills, use progressive enhancement,
use what the web platform offers you,
and use JavaScript responsibly.
ADA ROSE CANNON: 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 actually
do wonders for your SEO.
MARTIN SPLITT: 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--
ADA ROSE CANNON: I think as long as there's
like 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 our what Google is thinking,
then it's going to enable developers to actually build
sites that make sense and take advantage of the web platform.
Like, 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.
MARTIN SPLITT: Fantastic closing words.
Thank you so much for being here.
ADA ROSE CANNON: Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARTIN SPLITT: This just in, the next episode
of "SEO Mythbusting" is going to 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.