Google updates indexing to execute JavaScript
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7805144
What I'm wondering is, if you have a server than supports "both" methods (dynamic page and "fallback"), how do you know which one to serve? And should they be at different addresses? If they weren't, wouldn't this break caching? If they were, how can you redirect from a "noscript" tag if you have um, no script? Etc etc.
What I get from this announcement is that their crawler is becoming good enough at executing dynamic pages that having to serve a separate static version may soon become unnecessary.
[0] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...
...for the purposes of being indexed by Google.
I am always careful to build dynamic apps which render the HTML correctly on the server. Its handy not just for SEO. It also allows you to support legacy browsers and it dramatically decreases load times.
But if google is the only search engine you care about, and load times and legacy browsers don't matter to you, by all means, continue building one-page JS apps. There are often less headaches to be had when you go the simple route.
Each app uses little wrapper libaries to agnostically behave the same way on client/server. Both the client and server environment have access to routing functions and cookies, using redirects and headers on the server and pushstate on the client.
These apps are much more cross-platform and quick because the app is visible as soon as the css loads. The app will mostly work before the client js launches, because all links are generated by the router and injected into the anchor href by react.
The idea is to have a genuine, working html & css site with a dynamic layer when the browser supports it.
Maybe I should start a blog on some of these topics..
they mention some upcoming tooling that might help "To make things easier to debug, we're currently working on a tool for helping webmasters better understand how Google renders their site. We look forward to making it to available for you in the coming days in Webmaster Tools. "