Does Google perform onClick actions?

Question

Can somebody approve to see, that Google (googlebot / crawler) performs onClick (or similar js) actions? It is fact, that Google performs POST - i'm interesting, whether somebody has realized any js action done by Google

Answer 1

There is a article on Searchengineland: http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157

They tested a lot of different typical JS use cases and most of them are handled fine by google. But it is important to allow Google access to your js / css assets to render your whole site. There are some rumors, the browser Chrome is only a side product of the crawler Google is using.

If SEO is important for your business i would not recommend you to implement any SEO critical js (like loading content via ajax) without heavy testing on your own.

Some time ago i set up a test too to find out which urls are crawled by google. But i guess Google only extracted the URL from the code and does not perform a real JS action. The article is in german, but "red" means "not crawled" and "green" means "crawled": http://www.sirpauls.com/welchen-links-folgt-google-ein-experiment/

Results for onclick:

<input type="button" name="the-button" value="THE BUTTON" onclick="window.location='http://www.domain.com/test/target.php?id=11'"/>
<button onclick="JavaScript:window.location='http://www.domain.com/test/target.php?id=18'">Click Me!</button>

= Not crawled

<div onclick="window.location='http://www.domain.com/test/target.php?id=12'">THE DIV</div>
<a href="#" onclick="window.location='http://www.domain.com/test/target.php?id=3';">Link</a>

= Crawled