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Tell HN: Google Is Hurting Modern Web Apps

2 points by ent101 7y ago

I just wanted to say that Google's laser focus on "content" is really hurting modern Single-Page Apps. A lot of developers have to insert unnecessary garbage "SEO" text into their interfaces just to make Google happy. Some apps consist of large iframes from other domains (for security reasons) and Google thinks they are spam or "thin content" and might penalize them... All these are holding the web-app ecosystem back.

tastroder 7y ago
> A lot of developers have to insert unnecessary garbage "SEO" text into their interfaces just to make Google happy. Lots of developers are forced to add meaningful semantic annotations to their content to help machines discover their content. That helps users in how they are able to jump into the content and systems (not necessarily only the Google bot) to understand what you're trying to serve to the user. If you are building a user facing service, discoverability should be part of your problem statement. SEOs and their crap techniques a decade ago brought the need for these structured mitigations onto the web, not Google. > Some apps consist of large iframes from other domains (for security reasons) and Google thinks they are spam or "thin content" and might penalize them... Would you mind giving examples for this? It's not the responsibility of a search engine to interpret why a marginal fraction of SPAs would do that, security reasons sounds like an excuse for not building sensible integrations between two services. If a SPA is a collection of iframes it's likely that the thing I'm looking for is on the target of one of these frames. > All these are holding the web-app ecosystem back. Google, as in the search engine, went to great lengths to support dynamic content in the first place. I find focusing on content pretty sensible, if I search for something I usually expect to find the content I am looking for, not random SWAs for the sake of it. What exactly would you want them to do differently?

2 points by ent101 7y ago

tastroder 7y ago

> A lot of developers have to insert unnecessary garbage "SEO" text into their interfaces just to make Google happy. Lots of developers are forced to add meaningful semantic annotations to their content to help machines discover their content. That helps users in how they are able to jump into the content and systems (not necessarily only the Google bot) to understand what you're trying to serve to the user. If you are building a user facing service, discoverability should be part of your problem statement. SEOs and their crap techniques a decade ago brought the need for these structured mitigations onto the web, not Google. > Some apps consist of large iframes from other domains (for security reasons) and Google thinks they are spam or "thin content" and might penalize them... Would you mind giving examples for this? It's not the responsibility of a search engine to interpret why a marginal fraction of SPAs would do that, security reasons sounds like an excuse for not building sensible integrations between two services. If a SPA is a collection of iframes it's likely that the thing I'm looking for is on the target of one of these frames. > All these are holding the web-app ecosystem back. Google, as in the search engine, went to great lengths to support dynamic content in the first place. I find focusing on content pretty sensible, if I search for something I usually expect to find the content I am looking for, not random SWAs for the sake of it. What exactly would you want them to do differently?