Martin Splitt from Google said Google may decide to one day drop support reading the content within the noscript tag for images. He said Google currently does not support it for anything but images, but it may decide to stop supporting it as well for images.
Martin said this at the 13:09 mark into this video. He ended by being super clear, he said "at this time of recording today, April 8, 2020, as far as I'm aware we are still supporting the noscript workaround for images. But that's specifically for images it does not work for the other things." He also said he "would not use the noscript" because Google may decide to stop supporting it at some point in the future.
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Here is the full transcript of this part:
Noscript actually helpful for image indexing for lazyloaded images or is it like John Mueller said Google ignores it.The quote there is slightly out of context, I think, I actually haven’t, I don't remember, I think it's the quote is slightly out of context there.
Because we do ignore content in noscript except for images interestingly enough. ‘
For images specifically we have a workaround that allows you to use images in noscript and we will index it but we are not sure how long that's going to stay that way and if we really need this. If engineering finds out they don't need to do this, they don't need to support this, they might remove it. We have seen with the pagination situation last year that that can lead to confusion. It does happen every now and then there's many many engineers working on this and sometimes they decide that well we get the signals elsewhere so it's not no big deal. Then they run an experiment find out yeah it really is no big deal but then we have to communicate the changes.
So I would shy away from noscript because there's better alternatives. The alternatives are using later lazy loading which is a fantastic progressive enhancing way or using a as robust as possible JavaScript implementation to do lazy loading.
So I would not use the noscript for back at this time of recording today April 8, 2020 as far as I'm aware we are still supporting the noscript work around for images. But that's specifically for images it does not work for the other things.
Last time we covered this, we were a bit confused by the communication around this. I thought Google stopped supporting it completely but then they said it was supported for images.
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