: SEO Impact of Javascript for typography (like kerning.js, lining.js & co) From the design perspective the typography options presented by css are somewhat limited and there exist many javascript

Posted in: #Html #Javascript #Seo #Typography

From the design perspective the typography options presented by css are somewhat limited and there exist many javascript libaries that give us very handy tools to manipulate the font-rendering. However they change the html code and I wonder about the impact on SEO / SEF:

e.g. The kerning.js libary allows us to conviniently adjust the space between each letter. Since there is no way to do that in css it has to split the words into seperate letters and wraps everything into a span.

Something like this:

<h1>Test<h1>

gets turned into something like that:

<h1><span>T</span><span>e</span><span>s</span><span>t</span></h1>

A few years ago search engines couldn't execute js and therefore it was fairly safe to assume that such javascript wouldn't have any negative impact, but what are the best practices nowadays?. Does it help to block the javascript execution via the UserAgent or deny access via robots.txt ?

Or are search engines 'smart' engough to detect "That's only javascript to change the rendering - the content remains the same and We ignore common libaries such as lining.js, kerning.js, type.js..."

Any insights on that matter would be greatly appreciated.