does it affect site's SEO?
but hey no problem it's JS, so to correct that SEO problem they will probably do a whole render of the page server-side with something like PhamtomJS and serve those "special" pages to bots
which I think is totally insane
Explanation of it: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-fetch-as-googlebot-li...
go there http://web.archive.org/web/20160119113309/http://cdmedia.git...
view source, that's what archive.org_bot is referencing eg. no content whatsoever
if/when this site die, when you will browse the link above, you will see a blank page
I would even say that on web.archive.org the effect is even more vicious, if you don't know any better, because you see the page archived you think it is indeed archived when in fact it's not
but don't despair, there are other way to have the exact same result for your SEO
tell me how it is different than rendering the whole page as Flash SWF file ?
GoogleBot can read/parse SWF and even understand when dynamic text/xml is loaded https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2008/06/improved-...
since 2008
My guess is it will be OK for the text, but links will be out of whack so bots won't really "crawl" the site. Then again, maybe advanced bots will run the js?
also, I know words in h-tags are usually "counted" as more important, so that logic won't work with raw .md
there is no text, the page is empty, the linking is not the first priority at this point
a robot to be able to read the text would already need to run the js in the first place
but the concept is interesting let's do a CONTENT management system but be completely invisible to any search bots so our CONTENT never ever get referenced and searchable on the Internet
It would probably reduce the score though.
sure Google is the bigger one and you have to be referenced on it, but there are also other indexes where you want to be referenced, and those are maybe not using robots as advanced as google.
So, as I said, for your normal robot crawler visiting the page, the page is empty, no content.
That Google have already solved the problem does not mean that everyone else did.
Why do you think prerender.io exists ? to solve that very same problem
From a SEO point of view, which was the question I was answering, it is ridiculous to serve a page without content to an indexing robot crawler.
-4 ? go all educate (F) yourself :)
I mean here a list of active robots crawler https://udger.com/resources/ua-list/crawlers
here an example of how people apply that in practice https://gist.github.com/Stanback/7028309
also last but not least, yeah GoogleBot parse/read JS, but do read their guidelines https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2014/10/updating-...
"Make sure your web design adheres to the principles of progressive enhancement"
serving a blank page, that you then fill with content using pushState is not what I call progressive enhancement