Google has released its latest Webmaster Help video. This time, Matt Cutts discusses single-page sites, and how Google handles them. Specifically, he responds to the following user-submitted question:
What does Google think of single-page websites? They are becoming more complex and there are some great websites using only a single page (+lots of CSS and JavaScript) bringing the same user experience as a regular website with many subpages.
“Google has gotten better at handling javascript, and a lot of the time, if you’re doing some strange or unusual javascript interaction, or pinning some part of the page, or something like that, or having things fold in or fold out, we’re pretty good at being able to process that,” says Cutts. “In general, I would run a test first. I wouldn’t bet your SEO legacy on this one single page working well if the javascript or CSS is really obscure or maybe you’ve forgotten and blocked that out in robots.txt. But if you run the test, and you’re pretty happy with it, I don’t necessarily see a problem with that.”
“It’s a different convention,” he continues. “Sometimes it works. Maybe you get better conversions, maybe you don’t. It’s going to depend on what your particular area is, what the topic is, what kind of layout you come out with…but if it works for you, and for users to have that all on one page, for the most part, it should work for Google as well.”
On a semi-related topic, here’s what Cutts had to say about a year ago about blocking Google from javascript and CSS. Here, he talks about Google getting better at handling javascript.