Don’t use client side scripting for Googlebot

Recently I have been involved in creating VIZBI website. The VIZBI initiative is an international conference series bringing together researchers developing and using computational visualization to address a broad range of biological research areas.

We have been using jQuery extensively on the website, however there was one drawback: compatibility Googlebot. Unfortunately it cannot interpret JavaScript, therefore data retrieved by client side, could not be parsed. We have redesigned the video page and the text and data is shown by PHP, and now it can parsed by Google as it is shown here:

videosvizbi

Meanwhile we still use jQuery and plugins built upon it in order to arrange and visualize the elements on the webpage in a nice way. The following links helped us to have Googlebot crawled our website.

Vimeo SEO: How To Get Embedded Vimeo Videos Into

Tricky situation: video sitemaps for external videos + JS overlay