Client-side JS Redirects: Can Googlebot Detect Them?

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi everyone John Mueller here with another episode of ask Google webmasters a video series in which we answer your questions about Google search and websites today's question is from yes I'm Vinny who's asking can Google evergreen chromium detect client-side JavaScript redirects I'm not able to submit Google search console indexing requests to pages that have client-side JavaScript redirects to a subscription page thank you for all your questions but first let me back up a bit and explain where some of that comes from before diving into the question itself Googlebot is what we use to crawl the web to find public and crawlable pages that we can include in our search results over the years we've started using a version of Chrome to do a part of that to make sure that we can see what users would see when they use their browsers to view those pages until earlier this year we were using a special older version of Chrome for that and now we've started using a recent version of Chrome and we're updating that automatically over time a browser that's kept updated automatically is often called an evergreen browser so essentially when we talk about evergreen Googlebot we're saying that it's rendering with the recent version of Chrome similar to what you'd have on your computer as well by using redirects you're telling us that you'd prefer to have a different URL or at least the contents of a different URL indexed we support JavaScript redirects of different types and follow them similar to how we'd follow server-side redirects JavaScript redirects are important for well unsurprisingly JavaScript based sites which we also work hard to support all that said submitting a URL for indexing that redirects doesn't really make much sense for indexing since the redirect tells us you'd prefer to have the other URL indexed so my recommendation would be to submit the URL that you'd like to have indexed instead or even better make sure that we can discover those URLs automatically for example if this URL is linked properly within your website we'll discover it through our normal crawling anyway you can also help us to pick up changes a bit faster by using a sitemap file I hope this helped to clear up some of the questions here if you have further questions about how Google uses JavaScript and search make sure to check out our developer documentation linked in the description below and if you want to ask us a different question don't forget to use the hashtag ask Google webmasters on Twitter [Music]