Matt Cutts Advice on JavaScript Access: Don’t Block It All!

When asked if Googlebot should be blocked from accessing CSS & JavaScript Files, Matt Cutts said that it is not advisable because CSS and JavaScript files let Google know what the website is all about. If you block Googlebot in accessing your CSS and JavaScript files, your rankings might be hurt but it doesn’t mean that CSS and JavaScript can push you up the ranks. In lieu of this if you block Google in accessing all of CSS and JavaScript, it can’t see the whole profile of the website. It can tell Google if what is your website is all about and therefore it can give better result to the user.

Thus, allowing Googlebot to access CSS and JavaScript files can help in indexing the website, however, recently Matt Cutts was asked again: What if  Google is keep on crawling your JavaScript file and considering that the text are referring to URLs?

For the first time, Matt Cutts answered the question directly and concretely. His answers can be seen in this video:

He emphasized that you can block Google from accessing JavaScripts that pose threat to your website performance (in this case, Googlebot happens to pick up pseudo URLs that are nonsense in nature). Inspect the attributes of the website where Google needs to be blocked off. As they said “heal only the broken ones”. It will compel web owners to ensure that the site structure no matter what the coding practice is, is clean. It will also help in avoiding redundancy and overloading.

If you think Matt Cutts was inconsistent, that’s not it. In the first video, he didn’t want to block Google in accessing all CSS and JavaScripts neither in the second one. This is because some of CSS and JavaScript attributes can be helpful for the website. What a web owner needs to do is to maintain the website’s cleanliness to meet the requirements of Google. Just like on the links you can also add like a “nofollow” attribute on URLs, where in you can also block just an individual JavaScript file only but not all files or to those areas only where confusions occurs.

In my experience as an SEO expert, it won’t hurt your site if you use CSS and JavaScript. It will not pull down your rankings. However, some prerequisites are required by Google, because it can be more complicated than HTMLs, a little extra care of running the codes for CSS and JavaScript is needed.

This is another example of granular action taken by Google. It only means that Google is being strict and specific about the website’s structure. Google considers that CSS and JavaScript can add value to the page as users can see more of dynamic contents. However, it should not jeopardize the guidelines set by Google in terms of indexing clean slate websites and give high rankings to be shown in the SERP.

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