Do Google's crawlers interpret Javascript? What if I load a page through AJAX? [closed]

Answer 1

Now It looks ike Google bot is not limited to simple lynx like browser.

Google bot tries to grab the Humanly visible and Humanly contrasting text to give importance in different sectors of page. So it renders the page with a Layout Engine just like another browser like FF or Chrome have.

It might even have v8 Javascript Engine support. and the bot might load the page and wait till dom is ready and may even wait for few seconds for the page to come to a stable view. and then crop the contrasting text.

Answer 2

Despite the answers above, apparently it does interpret JavaScript, to an extent, according to Matt Cutts:

"For a while, we were scanning within JavaScript, and we were looking for links. Google has gotten smarter about JavaScript and can execute some JavaScript. I wouldn't say that we execute all JavaScript, so there are some conditions in which we don't execute JavaScript. Certainly there are some common, well-known JavaScript things like Google Analytics, which you wouldn't even want to execute because you wouldn't want to try to generate phantom visits from Googlebot into your Google Analytics".

(Why answer an answered question? Mostly because I just saw it because of a duplicate question posted today, and didn't see this info here.)