Can search engine spiders see content I add using jQuery?

Question

I currently have something like this

Answer 1

Google Site Search isn't able to index content contained in JavaScript. source http://www.google.com/support/customsearch/bin/answer.py?answer=72366

Answer 2

No. Search engines (at least Google) don't run javascript. In fact, a way of seeing how the search engines see your page is by disabling javascript and images.

Answer 3

Despite what is being stated here in other answers and totally contrary to Google's own FAQ, a Google employee named JohnMu answered a question recently in Google Groups about how the GoogleBot came to follow a non-existent URL. (The actual URL was contained within the jQuery code itself and the GoogleBot DID try to follow it.)

jQuery causing 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools

Google Employee explains how JavaScript and jQuery are indexed

Apparently, Google does attempt to index your JavaScript.

Quote Google's JohnMu:

"I would also recommend not explicitly disallowing crawling of the jQuery file. While we generally wouldn't index it on its own, we may need to access it to generate good Instant Previews for your site."

JohnMu later in the same thread...

"Additionally, we're constantly working on improving processing of JavaScript for web-search in general, so if you use jQuery to pull in content, and the jQuery script is disallowed for Googlebot, then we would not be able to look at that at all."

Answer 4

Search Engine Spiders are basic browsers, which have functionality just to parse your html content. So basically if you add links or content using JavaScript than SES wont be able to get it.

It's known that JavaScript is unfriendly to SES.

There are SES which use JavaScript parser and they are able to execute just simple javascript.

SES - Search Engine Spider.

Answer 5

The answer is No. Having less JavaScript DOM Manipulation and less flash contents at your site is something that is encourages. AMAIK when a robot visits your a page of your site, it doesn't execute the script of that page and indexes what it get at first shot :) Anyway, there is a good article about SEO at here.