What does googlebot see? Generated code or Source code?

Question

I am wondering what the googlebot will see when we use jQuery for rounded corners where jQuery generates the outer divs for the corners.

Will this method affect SEO ranking?

Answer 1

googlebot will see your source. Look at your site with javascript disabled to get an idea.

Answer 2

For a discussion of what googlebot does with Javascript on your page, see here (it's not the simplest issue in the world, and of course it can change all the time as the bot keeps being developed in order to try and handle JS "for the best" in the face of an always-changing web!-).

Answer 3

The Google web crawler won't see the rounded corners, but it doesn't matter. It's not interested in how pretty the page looks, it's only interested in the content, links, and any meta information you may have included. The rounded corners are for aesthetics and user appeal, and will have no bearing on the bot.

Answer 4

Googlebot only reads the source code of your site. It tries to break down the hierarchy of content on the page and extract a topic or keywords that seem to represent the page. It won't see anything you insert dynamically with JavaScript.

This is one of the most compelling arguments for unobtrusive JavaScript and CSS styling. Using CSS, you can make virtually any markup appear any way you like, so best practice is to write your HTML in a very semantic, logical fashion, then script and style on top of that to make the page attractive and usable for your human audience using a visual browser.

Answer 5

As Alex Martelli pointed out, Googlebot does have some measure of javascript parsing ability, but you absolutely should NOT rely on it. For the most part, it sees the page without any javascript or CSS enabled, basically. It doesn't care about the layout, just the raw HTML content. This is a good moment to note why Flash and AJAX content are utterly terrible for SEO.

To answer your question, no, the jQuery rounded corner divs will not affect your ranking.