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Comment by dansingerman | Hacker News Reader

We built our site, https://appapp.io (a search engine for the App Store) as a one page app. It serves no dynamic content in html from the server, so we were unsure to what extent google would spider/index it.

As far as we can tell, it makes no difference from if it was generated server side: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aappapp.io

So yes, Google definitely does index dynamic content. I would love to know if it ranks it equivalently.

Also, Bing does not: http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3aappapp.io

(apologies for the minor self-promotion)

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If you do a search with 'site:site:https://appapp.io' and go to the last page of results, you'll see Google indexed officially approximately 120 results. For example, this request does not return any content: 'site:https://appapp.io "Release notes for version 6.6.0"'. It should return the page /<lang>/app/we-heart-it/539124565.

Yes, we have more work to do to get Google to index all our content. It's still a bit of a mystery to us (Google webmaster tools tells us about 2500 pages are in their index)

Our goal is not to have every app indexed (as that will by definition be non-original content), but to have our app category pages indexed, e.g. https://appapp.io/gb/genre=Games;has_iap=false;price=Paid/se...

Moreover, note that in the SERP, you can find some pages with the good title but with the wrong description, cf. the 2 first results for example here http://imgur.com/cOV85UJ.

BTW, if you don't want every app to be indexed, I would recommend you the tag <meta name="bots" content="noindex"> in the app pages. Alternatively, you could define the canonical URL as the URL of the original content.

Thanks. We have a lot of optimisation to do. When we launched we weren't sure to what extent we'd be indexed.

Now that we know we are (by Google at least) we can put some focus on optimising our SERPS.

We have a ReactJs application served from S3 with dynamic content on https://teletext.io. All content (eg texts) is loaded asynchronously from a CloudFront distribution and I can confirm this is indexed properly by Google (see https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ateletext.io).

The only thing we cannot seem to get right are the meta title and meta description. If you set that asynchronously based on the React page you are rendering, Google only seems to pick it up in about 10% of the pages. So the SERPS doesn't look as pretty as you would like. I didn't found a solution for that yet. :-(

Maybe clearing up some parts about the mysteries there:

I recently did a talk at GDG about the efforts to get our SPA ranking in the Google SERPs, maybe some enlightening parts in there :)

TL;DR: All possible, same rankings, some caveats though.

GDG DevFest 2015 - We can't use Angular. It will hurt our SEO. [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1pfC1M7Dg

We found the same thing with Angular. Ironic and annoying.

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