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SEO has been a major factor in my reluctance to implement client-side JS frameworks in many projects (we work with wedding photographers and other small busines

SEO has been a major factor in my reluctance to implement client-side JS frameworks in many projects (we work with wedding photographers and other small businesses who live and breath on being found in Google). It actually seems harder to optimize a JS-heavy site than a Flash site (which we used to sell a lot of). If Google can actually index and rank a businesses website that is, say, pure BackboneJS that would be awesome. But I'd like to see it in the wild before trying to sell something like that. For example, AirBnB appears to be using Backbone here: https://www.airbnb.com/s/San-Francisco--CA--United-States https://www.airbnb.com/s/San-Francisco--CA--United-States Is Google able to crawl their listings by executing all the JS? Or is AirBnB implementing other tricks to get indexed?

frik 12y ago
Google licensed the Adobe Flash text extraction library. Using the library it was easy to extract text and links. * Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Content (2008): http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing... * Adobe page: https://web.archive.org/web/20080702135702/http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080702135702/http://www.adobe.... Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first- class citizen in searchable web content. Google uses the Adobe Flash Player technology to run SWF content for their search engines to crawl and provide the logic that chooses how to walk through a SWF. Edit: parent commenter edited/changed his text quite a bit, originally it was about Flash content
- callmeed 12y ago
  Yeah, but this didn't work for dynamic content inside of Flash (i.e. the swf loading image or text content from a server-side API).
- KMag 12y ago
  Google engineer Ran Adler (sometimes he spells his first name Ron to avoid confusing English speakers) deserves most of the credit here. He went to Adobe with a proposal for the hooks into the Flash player that he needed and worked with their engineers to get those hooks working. I don't doubt there was a fair amount of work on Adobe's side, too, but it wasn't like Adobe had the technology in place before Ran started working with them. Ran came up with an API for the hooks he needed that didn't give away too much of the most clever parts of what he was doing. The belief was that Google would get the hooks it wanted and in return, Adobe could share the special Flash player with other major search engines and everyone would be indexing Flash content. The hope was that Google would just be doing it a bit more cleverly than the competition. I'm not sure if any of the other major search engines ever used the hooks Ran designed. Source: I worked on Google's rich content indexing team from 2006 to 2010. Ran worked mostly on Flash indexing and I worked mostly on JavaScript indexing.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    Within Adobe, this project was codenamed "Ichabod" because it was a "headless" (no rendering) Flash Player. :)
benregenspan 12y ago
AirBnB went to a lot of trouble to make their Backbone app render on both the client and server-side, without need for building different views for each: http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-open-sourced-rendr-run-your-backbonejs-a/ http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-open-sourced-rendr-run-your-bac... . This is a pretty awesome solution for those using Node.
userbinator 12y ago
If you want to know, just visit that AirBnB page with JS off; you can still see and browse the listings, so Googlebot can too.

frik 12y ago

Google licensed the Adobe Flash text extraction library. Using the library it was easy to extract text and links. * Google Now Crawling And Indexing Flash Content (2008): http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing... * Adobe page: https://web.archive.org/web/20080702135702/http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080702135702/http://www.adobe.... Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first- class citizen in searchable web content. Google uses the Adobe Flash Player technology to run SWF content for their search engines to crawl and provide the logic that chooses how to walk through a SWF. Edit: parent commenter edited/changed his text quite a bit, originally it was about Flash content

callmeed 12y ago
Yeah, but this didn't work for dynamic content inside of Flash (i.e. the swf loading image or text content from a server-side API).
KMag 12y ago
Google engineer Ran Adler (sometimes he spells his first name Ron to avoid confusing English speakers) deserves most of the credit here. He went to Adobe with a proposal for the hooks into the Flash player that he needed and worked with their engineers to get those hooks working. I don't doubt there was a fair amount of work on Adobe's side, too, but it wasn't like Adobe had the technology in place before Ran started working with them. Ran came up with an API for the hooks he needed that didn't give away too much of the most clever parts of what he was doing. The belief was that Google would get the hooks it wanted and in return, Adobe could share the special Flash player with other major search engines and everyone would be indexing Flash content. The hope was that Google would just be doing it a bit more cleverly than the competition. I'm not sure if any of the other major search engines ever used the hooks Ran designed. Source: I worked on Google's rich content indexing team from 2006 to 2010. Ran worked mostly on Flash indexing and I worked mostly on JavaScript indexing.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Within Adobe, this project was codenamed "Ichabod" because it was a "headless" (no rendering) Flash Player. :)

benregenspan 12y ago

AirBnB went to a lot of trouble to make their Backbone app render on both the client and server-side, without need for building different views for each: http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-open-sourced-rendr-run-your-backbonejs-a/ http://nerds.airbnb.com/weve-open-sourced-rendr-run-your-bac... . This is a pretty awesome solution for those using Node.

userbinator 12y ago

If you want to know, just visit that AirBnB page with JS off; you can still see and browse the listings, so Googlebot can too.