Google: Scrolljacking May Cause Rendering Issues But No Direct Ranking Impact

Google’s John Mueller said that while Google Search does not have anything specifically against scrolljacking where Google would issue a penalty or manual action for such practices, it may have an indirect issue for ranking in Google Search.

John was asked about scrolljacking by Matt in the latest Google SEO office hours at the 12:40 mark in the video. The question was, “scroll jacking is increasingly popular across the web generally it’s seen as a poor user experience. How does Google crawl this content and will this approach to user experience impact rankings?”

John replied, “I don’t think we’d see this set up as abusive so it’s not going to be a direct effect.”

He did say there may be page rendering issues when using scrolljacking. “However there might be technical second order effects that you might see. For example, Google renders pages by loading them in a theoretically really large mobile device. If the page doesn’t display the content there due to shenanigans with scroll events, then our systems might assume that the content isn’t properly visible,” John explained.

John added, “So in short I’d see this more as a potential rendering issue than a quality one.”

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at Twitter.