Does the GoogleBot scroll down your page when indexing your site?

You set up your perfect site, Congratulations! Now what? You start blogging, perfect! You’re on a roll, but you’re still not getting any traffic, so what do you do now? Did you know that your site needs to be set up to be indexed by the Googlebot?

You probably heard that the Googlebot crawls your site to properly index and helps your site appear on major search engines? If you’ve been keeping up with the latest trends on SEO practices (and the debates that follow). Making sure that your website is properly indexed by search engines is a key factor in SEO, and understanding the function of the Googlebot can make or break your search results. First let’s understand what the Googlebot is before we get to the answer.

What is the GoogleBot?

The Googlebot comes in many names, crawlers, spiders, etc. It crawls the internet via links finding & reading updated content and the content then gets recommended to be added to the index. The index of course is all the results that you view when you make a simple Google Search, in other words it is Google’s Brain.

Why is this important?

Plainly speaking this is vitally important to your site being indexed on Google Search. These days most sites and blogs load content with a method called Lazy Loading. This method relies heavily on JavaScript in order to work.Cass Downton (@)@cassdownton · Oct 17, 2018Replying to @cassdownton

Make sure you have an alt attribute that describes what the image is and not what you want to rank the image for #pubcon @methodeCass Downton (@)@cassdownton

Lazy loading is usually triggered by JS scroll events and no search engine scrolls. If you lazy load images, search engines won’t see the actual image #pubcon @methode recommends putting image tags in a <noscript> so Google can see it78:47 PM – Oct 17, 2018Twitter Ads info and privacySee Cass Downton (@)’s other Tweets

However we see from a video where John Mueller states that the Googlebot does indeed scroll a “bit”.Natzir Turrado@natzir9

1 – Gary Illyes “no search engine scrolls”
2 – John Mueller: “we do scroll a little bit”
Source 1 – https://twitter.com/cassdownton/status/1052579458635333632 …
Source 2 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=32&v=g3yrNZ_FQGQ … #pubcon  YouTube at 🏠 ‎@YouTube

Cass Downton (@)@cassdowntonReplying to @cassdowntonLazy loading is usually triggered by JS scroll events and no search engine scrolls. If you lazy load images, search engines won’t see the actual image #pubcon @methode recommends putting image tags in a <noscript> so Google can see it338:59 PM – Oct 17, 2018Twitter Ads info and privacy22 people are talking about this

So what gives, does Googlebot scroll or not?

The quick answer is, it depends. SEO changes every day, and it’s very important to be up to date with all the new tricks of the trade. Therefore it’s important to have a professional dedicated to optimizing and maintaining your site’s SEO. Contact us today to see how our team of SEO specialists can take the stress out of SEO for you and your team!