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At the recent Google I/O conference it was announced that Google crawlers will begin considering urls and links generated by JavaScript, Flash and Flex apps. The issue that this seemingly addresses is that certain links are counted and others are discounted when determining pagerank because of the way they are implemented. As this has never been an issue in my own efforts, I was curious if anyone else has encountered the issue and what your thoughts are on the viability of the new solution from Google.

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The points raised by and boil down to two practical concerns: make sure important links and content remain discoverable long-term, and avoid accidental policy violations from commercial placements. Below is a short, actionable checklist to help site owners validate and harden pages without assuming any particular search-engine behavior.

  • Quick audit: open the page source and then inspect the live DOM with browser DevTools to spot anchors or href values that appear only after scripts run.

  • Capture the rendered output regularly using a headless renderer (for example Puppeteer or Playwright) so you can automate checks for dynamically injected links and text.

  • Use Search Console URL Inspection (or equivalent) to compare the server-delivered HTML with the rendered DOM; treat mismatches in core navigation or paid links as bugs to fix.

  • If links are commercial, mark them explicitly with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" and keep records of placements and contracts to reduce policy risk.

  • Prefer server-side rendering, pre-rendering, or progressive enhancement for critical navigation and content so essential links exist in the raw HTML and are not dependent on client-side scripts. Monitor server logs and crawls to spot whether bot requests fetch your script resources.

Hiding commercial links is a risk; fixing visibility and adding explicit rel attributes is low-effort insurance. See Progressive enhancement and Google’s guidance on .

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Well, it is great seeing how Google is making progress in discovering and scanning the contents hidden inside some complex web forms and files, although it has already started crawling the texts inside Flash files but even in the future, using the simple text words and phrases is going to be the recommended approach in page building.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

Well, it is great seeing how Google is making progress in discovering and scanning the contents hidden inside some complex web forms and files, although it has already started crawling the texts inside Flash files but even in the future, using the simple text words and phrases is going to be the recommended approach in page building.

There is a possible downside to this as I was reading that some SEOs use JavaScript as a way to hide paid links and still be in Google's good graces. Now that they are crawling JavaScript the Paid Links will be seen and a lot of website's will be in violation of Google rules about paid links without even knowing it. This is all pretty new to me so I am still trying to learn but this seems like Google was trying to help and may actually cause more harm than good.

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