Delayed page content loading(?)

[JorgeV]

Hello-

From time to time, I see sites which are displaying rectangles (solid colors) instead of lines of text, and images.The,n these rectangles are replaced with these texts and images. (Youtube, Facebook, etc... do it, if I don't make mistake).

My guess is that, this is to show the visitor "something" the sooner as possible, instead of waiting for the server to generate the whole page. So some kind of lazy or delayed loading.

So my questions are :

1- does this method has a "name"?
2- Do you think it can defeat most scrappers? I doubt that most scrapper programs are bothering rendering javascript, and eventually waiting fo ajax stuff, isn't it?
3- Does this method have a negative impact on Search engine indexing? Google renders Javascript, so it "should" get the right page content?

[tangor]

There are delay loading options (never used them myself).

Most times search engines ignore these things ... then again, their crawl budget is rather narrow and one has to consider that, too.

My experience is NIL in this regard, so hoping others will chime in with real world examples/experience!

[not2easy]

Have you taken a look at the page source code to identify what is shown in that space?

[lucy24]

What do you see if you turn off scripting before loading the page?

If a site requires a placeholder before displaying TEXT, there is something severely wrong with the way the site is coded, because nothing is faster than text display. Is it set up so they won't show any text at all until the requisite font has been loaded from some third-party site, requiring extra seconds of download time? That sounds like something that would only work if you're a known, big-name site, so you can be confident your users won't close the tab in disgust before ever seeing any content.

You could easily tell all your images to have a background-color of, say, bright purple, and then users would see purple boxes until the images load up. (Wouldn't work for me, as most of my images are transparent.) I suppose it depends on your target audience. If you assume they have the attention span of a toddler and require bright colors immediately or they'll go away...

[NickMNS]

I'm guessing that this is done to prevent a DOM reflow. See this link: [stackoverflow.com...]
This is one of the many things that AMP does.

Do you think it can defeat most scrappers?

I doubt it. Most bots will wait until the page is load (on load event). These places holders appear during the load process but should typically be all gone once it is loaded.

Does this method have a negative impact on Search engine indexing?

No it likely has a positive impact, as it should speed up the page load.