"Additionally, we do some server side rendering, which is much easier with string templates because we don’t have to boot a whole PhantomJS environment."
Does it mean that google is able to crawl a discourse page even when it's using client-side mvc ? Can anybody tell me how it works ? Thanks.
Our site is indexable by Google and it doesn't do much fancy. On certain URLs, we generate a small HTML view of the content in the <noscript> tag. You can see this by viewing source or disabling JS in your browser. It's just a simple ERB template in Rails, and uses the same object graph that we serialize via Active Model Serializers.
Google can see it and index it, we've confirmed by searching post launch.
As time goes on we'll probably work more on it to make the SEO even better. As you can imagine it was tough to do when we were in stealth mode ;)