Killing SEO by Using Angular | Hacker News Reader

Killing SEO by Using Angular

searchenginejournal.com

30 pointsjmngomes15 comments

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http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2015/10/deprecatin...

>tl;dr: We are no longer recommending the AJAX crawling proposal we made back in 2009.

Google is now saying they will probably be able to just index your Angular app without any extra effort on your side.

Do note that this is the most basic of SEO: Actually having the search engine access your content, so it can index it.

It is, and has been, a far cry from actual optimization: Giving your content the best possible ranking it deserves.

Want to be able to rank for an exact sentence match? Sure, use Angular. Want to actually compete for rankings? Do not build a single-page Angular application.

Solid SEO is about optimizing for users, thinking: "would I do this if search engines did not exist?". SEO for Angular apps has become: "Detect and redirect one of the major search engines to a text alternative".

I interpret the above blog post as Google basically saying that the playing field is now leveled. If they can fully render client-side applications, why would there be any downsides to using a SPA?

It seems like the days of

>"Detect and redirect one of the major search engines to a text alternative"

are over

I'd be amazed if anyone with no knowledge of Angular (e.g. the "marketers" that are apparently its audience) comes out of reading this article _less_ confused.

To look at this differently, though, I would think that at some level GOOG and the other engines want to be able to accurately index content for their users, however it's generated on a given site. Obviously in past this tended to go the other way, a site's static content appeared to be one thing, but client-side scripts did various sneaky things to it, which is one reason Google traditionally processed js and css to some degree. But though that's still a concern, it's actually less of a problem if they are just running a webdriver over your site to figure out what it is.

Google's search definitely renders JS. The question is how much does it impact your page's rank to have it download and execute that JS?

I'm not sure, so I'd rather not think about it and just render my JS server side. React does with minimal effort https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/top-level-api.html#rea.... This also has the added benefit of making you think what the UX is like for people browsing without JS enabled.

If you want code snippets included as (distorted) pictures inside an article - here you will get it.

On the other hand: I learned that there are quite powerful pre-rendering libraries. That was nice.

I have no idea why anyone would build content pages with angular (or any other client-side framework). It's just stupid.

Client-side Frameworks work perfectly for "internal" (say: everything behind a login) Apps. Too many people follow every trend because it seems like the way to do things, or because it's just cool. Sometimes you really should think about the implications of your stack decisions.

Because they are no longer 'client-side' frameworks, in the strictest sense of the term. Server-side render is kind of de rigueur these days.

>Search engines do not render JS

seems iffy. Here's Google explaining how they do render JS http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/underst...

they do and have done for years. Years ago, even if you tried to not have google index your outpt from js ahem they nearly always could.

It's wrong to assume that Google is the only search engine. This kind of thinking leads to monopolies. And making your site readable without JS is a good practice anyway.

All he did was provide a counter-example to "Search engines do not render JS".

AKA, killing SEO by using Angular wrong.

We are using react, but the problem is the same. Thank to server-side rendering, we are perfectly comfortable with our microdata implementation, and have push 15+ million pages into Google search map.

This piece is very poorly written.

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