3 replies to this topic

[Dragon]

Hello,
I have recently been involved in revamping a site from scratch. Because of heavy backend requirement we chose to build it in Java - hence the page extensions are .jsp

Previously the site was quite well indexed in Google (it was .php before) and as this is my first involvement with a Java site - I am feeling butterflies in my tummy as to how Google will index it.

My question: I noticed that Google has crawled the site, as the index page is coming up in the index - however, the page title and meta tags reads as follows on the SERP's:

<title>This site requires javascript.
<desc>This site requires javascript.

I do have meta data & title in all the site's pages.

Could anyone with Java site experience & SEO please shed some light as to why this is occuring?

Also - any other advice or tips for a Java based site & SEO?

A rather panicked SEO

thanks!

[Dragon]

I think we may have found the problem!
For those interested:
We have a message that displays at the top of the page, stating that the site requires Javascript. Google could not proceed any further, as this was the only page it had indexed as yet. (new pages not yet indexed...) We have added a link to this page that it may crawl the rest of the site, so hold thumbs & hopefully next time Google crawls the site, it will display the proper title & description!

Sigh of relief!

[Randy]

Interesting...

(Disclaimer: I am definitely no JSP expert. Hopefully someone else is.)

JSP and Javascript are two totally different thing Dragon, so the jsp portion shouldn't really be a problem. JSP is just like php, asp, cfm, etc in that the server pre-processes things then delivers html.

But from the title and description it appears that the page is somehow generating a <noscript> tag with the text that says what you've quoted. <noscript> is a Javascript tag, not a JSP tag. Which confuses me.

When you view the source of the page(s) do you see <noscript> tags anywhere that could be causing this? What happens when you view the site with Javascript disabled in your browser?

<added> Looks like I'm too late again! Must type faster. </added>

[Dragon]

Thanks Randy - turns out that is exactly what it was!

Live & Learn