Google's Mobile-Friendly And Rich Results Test Tools, Updated To Better Support JavaScript Sites

Google's mobile-friendly test and the rich results test tools have been updated to support JavaScript sites better, by showing rendered HTML, console log, exceptions, and stack traces.

What this means, developers who build websites using JavaScript, AJAX or other forms of JavaScript frameworks, can effectively identify and correct errors related to mobile-friendliness and rich snippets in search results.

Whether it is to debug the site, or just to see the overall performance.

Below is a screenshot from Google, showing how the mobile-friendly test tool renders JavaScript:

Google

On the internet where more people are browsing using their mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is becoming more than just a must. Google's mobile-friendly tool is to test how easy a visitor can use your page on a mobile device.

"Today, everyone has smartphones with them, constantly communicating and looking for information. In many countries, the number of smartphones has surpassed the number of personal computers; having a mobile-friendly website has become a critical part of having an online presence," said Google

Rich results on the other hand, are search results that go beyond the standard blue link, they may include a carousel, image or other non-textual UI elements. The testing tool focuses on structured data types that are eligible to be shown as rich results, and allows users to test all data sources on their site's pages, such as JSON-LD (which Google recommends), Microdata, or RDFa.

"Over the years, the different ways you can choose to highlight your website's content in search has grown dramatically. In the past, we've called these rich snippets, rich cards, or enriched results. Going forward - to simplify the terminology - our documentation will use the name "rich results" for all of them," explained Google.

To use the tool, users just need to enter a page's URL to see how the page scores.

Published: 
14/05/2018