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Googlebot is now “evergreen”. But what does that mean?

In recent days, the Googlebot – the bot that crawls sites and then indexes them – has been made “evergreen”. This means that the bot is always up to date with the latest version of Google Chrome, Google's browser. What does that mean and what are the implications for your site? Thousands of features are […]

In recent days, the Googlebot – the bot that crawls sites and then indexes them – has been made “evergreen”. This means that the bot is always up to date with the latest version of Google Chrome, Google's browser. What does that mean and what are the implications for your site?

Thousands of features are now supported

The fact that the Googlebot is now up to date with the latest version of Chrome means that the crawler can now handle many more features that are built into websites today. The previous version of Googlebot used version 41 of Google Chrome to crawl your website. Features in a website that were not compatible with this version could therefore not be crawled properly. It could therefore happen that certain content could not be reached by the crawler and that content could subsequently not be indexed or not indexed properly.

By letting the Googlebot crawl your site with the latest version of Google Chrome, the bot can now navigate your website much better because it can handle - almost - all the technology you use in your site. For example, Googlebot can now handle ES6 well, a technology that we at Van Ons also use every day and in every project. IntersectionObserver is now also supported, so things like lazy load can now be properly crawled by the bot and the content underneath can therefore be properly indexed.

Due to this update the Googlebot is now available 1000+ features supported that previously could not be easily reached by the bot. Your site can now be crawled even better, resulting in a possible improvement in the search results.

What you still need to pay attention to

Not everything you can make work in Chrome can be properly viewed by the bot. Google has a special page has been created where developers can read what they still need to take into account. And sometimes Google has another one number of crawl attempts needed to be able to see everything on your website clearly. There are still many questions in the community about the latest update of Googlebot and the question is also whether the new version of the bot has already been rolled out everywhere.

Ordered before web developers and SEO specialists this update means at least less work to take technical measures to make the website well indexable. That saves time and money and ensures an even better indexable internet!