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Every time I see someone mention react and other frameworks are bad for SEO, I cant help but think, shouldn't search engines have to worry about this. Google a

Every time I see someone mention react and other frameworks are bad for SEO, I cant help but think, shouldn't search engines have to worry about this. Google and other search engines have brilliant people working for them who can create systems which can guess what I want to search before I have entered the entire query, and you are telling me these same people can't do something about pages using the latest technology. Sigh.

deleted 11y ago
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firasd 11y ago
Google has been working on this (I don't have deep knowledge of whether their solution is adequate for SEO. I just found this article that suggests it works fine: http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157 http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascri...) But I think, while we're making assumptions about the kind of technology good engineers should create, let's also ask Google-led Angular and Facebook-led React (and similar projects): if your library can manipulate HTML and the browser DOM, even while using async network requests to load data, why can't it take that same data and code to provide an HTML string upfront, as a "First Render"? This should be the standard way to do it. If React can re-render an input box every time I type a character, and not just generate HTML but also directly manipulate the DOM to reflect it, surely it can generate HTML for the input box upfront. (I don't know enough about the internals of these libraries, but maybe the fact that React is declarative makes this easier than it is for other libs.)
- neogenix 11y ago
  Here is another blog that tested it and concludes it works fine on Google: http://www.centrical.com/test/google-json-ld-and-javascript-crawling-and-indexing-test.html http://www.centrical.com/test/google-json-ld-and-javascript-... I don't think Bing and Yandex are supporting this yet though.
- tyingq 11y ago
  There's a followup to that article where they specifically look at Ajax and conclude that there are still issues: http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-sites-235267 http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-...
deleted 11y ago
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tyingq 11y ago
>> I cant help but think, shouldn't search engines have to worry about this I don't think anyone disagrees with this, but production sites would then have an incentive to wait until search engines have figured it out. Or otherwise suffer the traffic loss. Google's 2014 summary of how well they do with javascript reads like "we just got this working, but there's lots left to do": https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-... . The fact that they went as late as 2014 before even trying doesn't inspire confidence.
smadge 10y ago
I think what made the web so successful is how an html document can be easily statically analyzed. Every action (state transfer) a web page is capable of is statically encoded in the page itself. That is, encoded through <a>, <form>, <input>, etc tags. This is the essence of the REST architecture. An algorithm analyzing a web page doesn't have to guess at what actions are available, or run arbitrary javascript in a sandboxed environment to figure it out. I think it's bad for the web as a whole to abandon this architecture. Web developers need to take responsibility for the web as a whole, and not just violate the webs fundamental assumptions and expect others to create complex, clever solutions to a manufactured problem.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

firasd 11y ago

Google has been working on this (I don't have deep knowledge of whether their solution is adequate for SEO. I just found this article that suggests it works fine: http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157 http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascri...) But I think, while we're making assumptions about the kind of technology good engineers should create, let's also ask Google-led Angular and Facebook-led React (and similar projects): if your library can manipulate HTML and the browser DOM, even while using async network requests to load data, why can't it take that same data and code to provide an HTML string upfront, as a "First Render"? This should be the standard way to do it. If React can re-render an input box every time I type a character, and not just generate HTML but also directly manipulate the DOM to reflect it, surely it can generate HTML for the input box upfront. (I don't know enough about the internals of these libraries, but maybe the fact that React is declarative makes this easier than it is for other libs.)

neogenix 11y ago
Here is another blog that tested it and concludes it works fine on Google: http://www.centrical.com/test/google-json-ld-and-javascript-crawling-and-indexing-test.html http://www.centrical.com/test/google-json-ld-and-javascript-... I don't think Bing and Yandex are supporting this yet though.
tyingq 11y ago
There's a followup to that article where they specifically look at Ajax and conclude that there are still issues: http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-sites-235267 http://searchengineland.com/can-now-trust-google-crawl-ajax-...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 11y ago

>> I cant help but think, shouldn't search engines have to worry about this I don't think anyone disagrees with this, but production sites would then have an incentive to wait until search engines have figured it out. Or otherwise suffer the traffic loss. Google's 2014 summary of how well they do with javascript reads like "we just got this working, but there's lots left to do": https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-... . The fact that they went as late as 2014 before even trying doesn't inspire confidence.

smadge 10y ago

I think what made the web so successful is how an html document can be easily statically analyzed. Every action (state transfer) a web page is capable of is statically encoded in the page itself. That is, encoded through <a>, <form>, <input>, etc tags. This is the essence of the REST architecture. An algorithm analyzing a web page doesn't have to guess at what actions are available, or run arbitrary javascript in a sandboxed environment to figure it out. I think it's bad for the web as a whole to abandon this architecture. Web developers need to take responsibility for the web as a whole, and not just violate the webs fundamental assumptions and expect others to create complex, clever solutions to a manufactured problem.