Basic Question: JavaScript Support

[TheEvster]

I just wanted to confirm an assumption... The major search engine spiders/bots don't understand JavaScript and simply skip over it, correct?

Do they render what's present in the <noscript> tag? I assume yes, but is there any data on which bots do and don't pay attention? I know what Lynx or Mosaic will display, but things aren't always exactly the same.

I did see an announcement that Googlebot 2.0 will understand CSS and JavaScript (http://www.adsensebits.com/node/24), but I'm wondering about current Googlebot as well as the other bots.

Thanks for any insight.

Evan

[orion]

Search engines are quite secretive at what they can or cannot parse/read/grab, and few documentation is out there. Once intelligence is collected one thing is scoring it/mixing it in their ranking recipe and other is using it for who knows what purpose.

From the technical standpoint, I don't see any difficulty at parsing, interpreting and grabbing CSS rules and javascript codes from documents or external files. In fact, I wrote a crude bot that does just that and more. It is quite trivial to do this with regular expressions.

Cheers

Orion