4 ms·

> The result is a website completely SEO friendly that will work for the two people in the whole world who disabled JS What will it take to dispel the myth tha

> The result is a website completely SEO friendly that will work for the two people in the whole world who disabled JS What will it take to dispel the myth that JS rendering isn’t SEO friendly? There seems so much confusion on this point but the fact is that as long as your UI is rendered synchronously (i.e., any data needed for the UI doesn’t have to get fetched from a server), the page will be crawlable by Google. Further, the goal of isomorphic rendering/rendering static sites in general is not to serve individuals who have JS disabled (that’s a bonus, sure), but rather to remove JS loading and execution from the equation with the end goal of faster paint times for your application. To be clear, this is a really cool project but I fear that many of us throw out keyword spam like SEO and UX to make something more digestible, when the reality is that the performance gain is the real hero!

lcw 10y ago
Do you have proof that JS rendering is equally as friendly to SEO as statically rendered html? I have been fighting this battle for a while at different places by I can't definitely prove it's true, and most SEO experts that I work with seem to be afraid to upset the apple cart explaining that Google might be good at it, but what about yandex or baidu. I know there are small tests, but has a large corporation where SEO really matters made the switch without a meaningful SEO hit?
- civilian 10y ago
  That's a bummer, but your SEO experts shouldn't be afraid! They shouldn't let you flip over the whole website either though. You guys should just run a test on one landing page. Yandex and Baidu are pretty ignorable, Google is King.
- dfabulich 10y ago
  On the contrary, all I've ever heard of are folks who start with JS rendering and then add server-side rendering (e.g. with React Server) and report how much better their SEO traffic gets.
romaniv 10y ago
Search is more than Google. There are many other search engines. And I'm not just talking just about Bing. I'm talking about the likes of Yandex and Baidu with huge user bases. Do you know whether they can crawl SPAs? What about Archive.org? What about new projects that just try to get started and need to crawl the web to do their thing? Saying "I don't care about those" over and over again is not a good enough answer.
agentgt 10y ago
> To be clear, this is a really cool project but I fear that many of us throw out keyword spam like SEO and UX to make something more digestible, when the reality is that the performance gain is the real hero! Yes but the performance gain can have an impact on SEO. I'll have to find the article but I believe the StackOverflow guys figured this out early on and blogged about it. Regardless of how the search engines interpret Javascript. If your site is slow it will take longer for indexers to index and they may penalize or throttle.
civilian 10y ago
At my company, we had difficulty making our landing pages rank when they were just written in React. We ran an experiment where we took out the interactive parts of it and just put the static content into a html page-- and it performed better. The other engineers and I were flabbergasted ("it's not supposed to make a difference!") but our SEO expert was not surprised that there was inconsistencies in the Googlebot documentation, and it goes to show that we still don't have a lot of transparency into the google algorithms. I suspect that, like you say, it was a speed-to-paint thing. But when you're in a crowded keyword space it makes a difference. (As oppose to when you're just trying to rank for your own unique name--- looking at you, Preact ;) )
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
detaro 10y ago
I remember reading about experiments that indicated that Google can do JS rendering, but the majority of crawler runs don't do it. It's more expensive and thus only done occasionally where necessary. Of course that could be outdated, or an artifact of their measuring methods, or ...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

lcw 10y ago

Do you have proof that JS rendering is equally as friendly to SEO as statically rendered html? I have been fighting this battle for a while at different places by I can't definitely prove it's true, and most SEO experts that I work with seem to be afraid to upset the apple cart explaining that Google might be good at it, but what about yandex or baidu. I know there are small tests, but has a large corporation where SEO really matters made the switch without a meaningful SEO hit?

civilian 10y ago
That's a bummer, but your SEO experts shouldn't be afraid! They shouldn't let you flip over the whole website either though. You guys should just run a test on one landing page. Yandex and Baidu are pretty ignorable, Google is King.
dfabulich 10y ago
On the contrary, all I've ever heard of are folks who start with JS rendering and then add server-side rendering (e.g. with React Server) and report how much better their SEO traffic gets.

romaniv 10y ago

Search is more than Google. There are many other search engines. And I'm not just talking just about Bing. I'm talking about the likes of Yandex and Baidu with huge user bases. Do you know whether they can crawl SPAs? What about Archive.org? What about new projects that just try to get started and need to crawl the web to do their thing? Saying "I don't care about those" over and over again is not a good enough answer.

agentgt 10y ago

> To be clear, this is a really cool project but I fear that many of us throw out keyword spam like SEO and UX to make something more digestible, when the reality is that the performance gain is the real hero! Yes but the performance gain can have an impact on SEO. I'll have to find the article but I believe the StackOverflow guys figured this out early on and blogged about it. Regardless of how the search engines interpret Javascript. If your site is slow it will take longer for indexers to index and they may penalize or throttle.

civilian 10y ago

At my company, we had difficulty making our landing pages rank when they were just written in React. We ran an experiment where we took out the interactive parts of it and just put the static content into a html page-- and it performed better. The other engineers and I were flabbergasted ("it's not supposed to make a difference!") but our SEO expert was not surprised that there was inconsistencies in the Googlebot documentation, and it goes to show that we still don't have a lot of transparency into the google algorithms. I suspect that, like you say, it was a speed-to-paint thing. But when you're in a crowded keyword space it makes a difference. (As oppose to when you're just trying to rank for your own unique name--- looking at you, Preact ;) )

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

detaro 10y ago

I remember reading about experiments that indicated that Google can do JS rendering, but the majority of crawler runs don't do it. It's more expensive and thus only done occasionally where necessary. Of course that could be outdated, or an artifact of their measuring methods, or ...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]