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SEO consultant here (yeah, yeah). Please, still in 2019, be careful with JavaScript unless you're willing to deal with a lot of uncertainty. Google routinely

SEO consultant here (yeah, yeah). Please, still in 2019, be careful with JavaScript unless you're willing to deal with a lot of uncertainty. Google routinely says how things are supposed to work, but there are plenty of examples where their crawlers act inconsistent to public statements. To be clear, probably not Googlebot's fault though; we as a species do a lot of weird things when building websites. Just finished a big project with a client who had a client-side render of their react app for the customer facing website. Googlebot was VERY sporadic with how they were indexing certain parts of the site, and in general, the site lost out to inferior sites in more competitive SERPs. Server side render fixed a lot of this and rankings/traffic jumped. It's also worth noting that the Bing/Yahoo crawlers (still a notable chunk of web traffic!) can't crawl JS. You can ignore this chunk of market share if you want but someone is going to happily take it. As a general rule, my advice is always this: Make it as easy as possible for bots to crawl and index your site's content. The more hoops the crawler is jumping through, the worse your site will perform in search engines.

NullPrefix 7y ago
> Server side render fixed a lot of this and rankings/traffic jumped. Good, they should just delist client side rendered web pages.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  While I love to rag on SPAs as much as the next person, doing that is ripe for antitrust. "They're trying to force the web to look like what they want"
  - greglindahl 7y ago
    “You didn’t go to huge extra expense to index my website so I am going to sue you for anti-trust” - good luck. Google has been picky about executing js all along.
- hazz99 7y ago
  Why? I enjoy writing client-side SPAs, and I can pump out a better UI/UX must faster than I could otherwise. My users don't care how I build it, just that the site works and is enjoyable to use. If I need server-side rendering I'll still write it with a client-side rendered (e.g. React), but tack on server-side rendering at the end.
  - NullPrefix 7y ago
    >My users don't care how I build it, just that the site works and is enjoyable to use. Filter out poor users by making the site inoperable with older hardware. If they cannot afford current gen i9, they will not afford whatever my ad network is pushing. Increases the conversion rate, so all is good.
    - hazz99 7y ago
      My laptop from 2011/2012 loads everything perfectly, albeit a bit slower. I assume most people have a computer produced in the last decade. Even my grandparents use an old iPad or cheap smartphone. My machine isn't particularly powerful either - I use an old Macbook.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        Even if it loads and performes OK, I still don't like it. Client-side rendering is making the web even more fragile - nothing is going to last anymore.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
      It is a website. If it requires i9 to run, something went seriously wrong. Was this sarcasm?
      - NullPrefix 7y ago
        Exaggeration.
  - wolco 7y ago
onetimeaccount1 7y ago
Bing Mobile Friendliness Test correctly renders JS pages. Fetch as BingBot does not currently. I logged a support request through Bing Webmaster and got a reply that their engineering team is working on it, so I would expect Bing to crawl JS sites just like Google in the near future.
- greglindahl 7y ago
  Executing js is expensive, so you should expect bing to limit its willingness to index such sites, same as google.
tomduncalf 7y ago
I have also had a site which was purely client side React fail to index properly - some pages were not picked up, others were indexed weirdly (some of the page content ended up in the title on google somehow!). Migrated the site to use react-static (which was not too painful a migration) and all good now! This was before the change google announced to using the latest Chromium for Googlebot so I’m not sure if that would have solved the issue.

NullPrefix 7y ago

> Server side render fixed a lot of this and rankings/traffic jumped. Good, they should just delist client side rendered web pages.

cameronbrown 7y ago
While I love to rag on SPAs as much as the next person, doing that is ripe for antitrust. "They're trying to force the web to look like what they want"
- greglindahl 7y ago
  “You didn’t go to huge extra expense to index my website so I am going to sue you for anti-trust” - good luck. Google has been picky about executing js all along.
hazz99 7y ago
Why? I enjoy writing client-side SPAs, and I can pump out a better UI/UX must faster than I could otherwise. My users don't care how I build it, just that the site works and is enjoyable to use. If I need server-side rendering I'll still write it with a client-side rendered (e.g. React), but tack on server-side rendering at the end.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  >My users don't care how I build it, just that the site works and is enjoyable to use. Filter out poor users by making the site inoperable with older hardware. If they cannot afford current gen i9, they will not afford whatever my ad network is pushing. Increases the conversion rate, so all is good.
  - hazz99 7y ago
    My laptop from 2011/2012 loads everything perfectly, albeit a bit slower. I assume most people have a computer produced in the last decade. Even my grandparents use an old iPad or cheap smartphone. My machine isn't particularly powerful either - I use an old Macbook.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Even if it loads and performes OK, I still don't like it. Client-side rendering is making the web even more fragile - nothing is going to last anymore.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
    It is a website. If it requires i9 to run, something went seriously wrong. Was this sarcasm?
    - NullPrefix 7y ago
      Exaggeration.
- wolco 7y ago

onetimeaccount1 7y ago

Bing Mobile Friendliness Test correctly renders JS pages. Fetch as BingBot does not currently. I logged a support request through Bing Webmaster and got a reply that their engineering team is working on it, so I would expect Bing to crawl JS sites just like Google in the near future.

greglindahl 7y ago
Executing js is expensive, so you should expect bing to limit its willingness to index such sites, same as google.

tomduncalf 7y ago

I have also had a site which was purely client side React fail to index properly - some pages were not picked up, others were indexed weirdly (some of the page content ended up in the title on google somehow!). Migrated the site to use react-static (which was not too painful a migration) and all good now! This was before the change google announced to using the latest Chromium for Googlebot so I’m not sure if that would have solved the issue.