Recommendation Engine Not being crawled by search engines

Shopify Discussion
1

Hi @malalta , we are having trouble with on page SEO. We noticed that our recommendation engine (You may also like) on product pages are not getting crawled by search engines since it is in JavaScript. Could you please help with the solution so that this section is crawled by search engines.

Thanks

2

Depending on which theme you’re using, Shopify’s product recommendations can be implemented primarily client-side with Javascript, or primarily server-side with Liquid. However, both techniques depend on calling a special URL for your store on page load and fetching the recommendations via ajax – so if you’re using Shopify’s recommendations, you can’t avoid using JS…

However this may not be that big of a deal for your SEO, since (contrary to popular belief) Google’s crawler does process Javascript. Here’s a good overview from Google on how to optimise your site’s JS for Google Search that you can go through if you’re doing this yourself, or pass on to your web developer / digital marketing agency:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/javascript-seo-basics

Also JS might be a red herring and your SEO problems could be elsewhere, since this search show that at least 2 pages on your site have been both crawled and indexed by Google and contain the “You may also like” text inserted by Shopify’s Recommendation JS:
https://www.google.com/search?q=thefunkydelicstore+%22you+may+also+like%22

If you log into Google Search Console and use their “URL inspection” tool you’ll see the HTML that Google Bot sees (with or without the Recommendation section) along with lots of other info including JS console error messages, if any. It’s a good tool and we usually recommending starting here, unless you / your agency have access to other (expensive) tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.

Hope that helps!
Andrew.

3

I didn’t know that Javascript could interfere with site analysis using a recommendation system. I’m glad you asked this question here. Of course, I noticed failures in my SEO, but I attributed it to other things. I really want my site’s algorithms to work better than they do now. I am developing a separate website for my brand. And I want shoppers to see current recommendations in the catalog of our products. I want something similar to algorithms from IG Stores. By the way, I read about Vody in https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/vody-stylehaul-stephanie-horbaczewski-jeremy-houghton-1234814177/. Have you heard about this new generation recommendation algorithm?