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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Am I crazy for thinking that SEO is a huge reason to NOT do a Single Page App for a public facing website that you want Google to index?

It seems like the wrong business choice from a marketing perspective that we are now looking for a tech solution to solve a problem we created ourselves. Single Page Apps feel like building Flash web apps 5 years ago. It's a valid choice, but with clear drawbacks.

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You are not crazy. The single page app trend is solidly in the "peak of inflated expectations" phase of the hype cycle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle ), which is why there exists a subculture of developers who are trying to use the approach for everything, even where it isn't appropriate.

I think the single page app trend is coinciding with the growth of javascript, HTML5. It shows that the websites of the future will be more and more like web applications, and they need dynamic UI. The thing that's stopping us the SEO problem, which I hope is no longer problem anymore with snapsearch.

> the websites of the future will be more and more like web applications, and they need dynamic UI. The thing that's stopping us the SEO problem, which I hope is no longer problem anymore with snapsearch.

This juxtaposition doesn't make sense. If the "dynamic UI" can't be done in a progressively enhanced way, why can it work in a gracefully degrading post-hoc way?

The main point of your software is that the output proves that progressive enhancement was the correct way to build the website in the first place.

Why not just render the public pages of your app out to HTML or use one of the phantom JS services to do it. Then when spiders come up the waterspout have your web server tell them where to go for your sites links.

If you don't ant to do it yourself there are quite a few companies that can help: http://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript/angularjs-seo-with-pre...

There's some important technical and operational differences from SnapSearch and using phantomjs, I answered this in a comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765731

I don't expect quickbooks or photoshop to be SEO friendly... anyone that expects a web based app to be is doing it wrong. Use shebang urls or working push state loading urls if you want SEO. Also, google does run JS against your rendered content.. just not as often.

Agree, to build website maybe not the best solution but i think it has it place for internal and no exposed apps like (CMS, andministrators, dashboards, etc) that normaly the public viewer wouldn't ever see.

I suppose React.js and similar approaches would make it easier, but I also don't immediately see the use case for building single-page apps that need indexation.

Well SnapSearch allows you to make dynamic web applications without worrying about SEO problems. It's not so much a technical solution to a technical problem that we created ourselves, it's the fact that search engines and social network robots have not caught up to next generation websites (which I believe will be a fully dynamic user experience).

We're just pushing the web ahead.

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