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Comment by lstamour | Hacker News Reader

The implication is that without server-side rendering, SEO would drop. This isn't actually true for Google (edit: sometimes!), since it executes JavaScript, in part to prevent SEO gaming of its platform. But it would likely harm other web crawlers unless care was taken to incrementally add Angular to the existing HTML pre-rendered, or to execute the Angular.js server-side for bots and a nice page load speedup.

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@lstamour Careful! We tested this theory last Fall with sailsjs.org and it turned out to be patently false-- we went from the second result when you google "Node.js framework" to not even being present. When I turned our headless browser snapshot stuff on again about a month later (we use brombone), it worked itself out. Needless to say, sucks :/ But everyone should be aware of the reality.

Sorry, that's true. I should have been a bit less forceful on that one. I know personally that there's a lot which goes into Google's rankings -- for instance: mobile optimization, SSL, and (where JS can slow things down the most) page speed. Google wants the web to be fast, and if two websites have identical rankings, it will rank the faster one higher. Waiting on JavaScript delays the "time to visible content" by a significant amount.

I know google is experimenting but I have never seen any JS rendered page in the google search result.

My mobile hacker news client http://hn.premii.com/ ranks top on Google but not because of the content. Content is not indexed by Google.

From my experience, the state of javascript for what's ostensibly the best web crawler in the world is still "it might work".

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