A client recently reported to me a slight drop in traffic. After investigating I noticed that the text between the "noscript" tags were showing up in Goggle's search results. I also noticed in the keywords was the word "JavaScript". The site sells clothing and the keyword JavaScript is not one that I would except to be in the top 50 keywords the site makes an impression for.

From an accessibility standpoint I use the noscript tag to provide alternative content for those who don't have JavaScript enabled or sometimes just to warn the users that the site requires JavaScript to run correctly.

On the site it now seems that Google is starting to index the content between these tags. The drop in rankings is more than likely down to the same sentence appearing at the top of every page.

The only conclusion I can think of is that despite the many incompatibilities between different browsers Google could be seeing the use of JavaScript as ubiquitous and by all accounts a successful technology. Google does not run JavaScript (so I am lead to believe) but I am certain they read it. Maybe this is a shot at telling me I no longer need noscrpt tags as never before has Google listed the content inside these tags (for this site anyway).... ok maybe not as its still recommended by W3C's "content container for non script-based rendering".

The issue I have with this theory is in the past spammers have exploited the noscript tag by stuffing keywords and irrelevant text in them at an attempt to achieve high rankings in the search engines. Clearly not something I would do, and not something I think Google would want to start embracing.

Maybe this is just a irregularity as other sites with the same noscript don't seem to be showing the same anomaly.

I would like to hear other ideas on why out-of-the-blue you think Google would do this?