Javascript Collections/Search Apps SEO Issue?

Technical Q&A
1

Dear all,

we think about Integrating a 3rd party tool for collections, filters and search as the standard shopify solution does not fit big catalogues (20k skus).

Klevu and Algolia seem to be Premium but they all use Javascript to display products. Our SEO Agency says that Javascript for product listing could be bad for SEO Rankings but there also many comments that Google learned to read Javascripts.

What is your opinion/experiences regarding this?

BR

Sven

2

What does search or a filter have to do with the rendered non-javascript content that is part of a product listing?

This is like saying having a menu that uses javascript is bad for product SEO.

Something is being badly communicating between parties or in the problem description here.

they all use Javascript to display products

Of which the canonical content exists on the product page itself.

And the use of Javascript to display search RESULTS that point to that content.

Collections may be a bit different when you no longer have a non-javascript based collection.

Each service should have docs on SEO guidance and support that should be able to clarify edge cases.

as the standard shopify solution does not fit big catalogues (20k skus).

Overall catalogue size is generally may not be the issue but the information architecture itself of the product data, how things are organized in collections/tags/etc, and how the search UI/UX and theme is setup , or complete lack thereof.

If the product data isn’t rock solid it’s not gonna matter what app/service you use as search results will be suboptimal by default.

Same thing for the theme’s search UI if it’s bad of course 20k skus is a problem.

3

Hey @PaulNewton ,

thank you for the detailed reply.

Here’s the reply of the SEO agency:

“The biggest problem the SEO agency sees, is our collection page. Products in the categories are only integrated in the page rendering with Javascript. No product information is included in the source code. This means that, for example, Google will not see any products in the categories in the first crawling phase and is dependent on the rendering with Javascript for each category.”

The problem is that all bigger product listing tools with great usability/conversion rate optimzation KI (Algolia, Klevu) seem to be integrated this way.

Do you agree on this? Do you have an idea how to solve this?

BR
Sven