WC & Google

[Artyom xDev]

Good day for everyone!

First, can someone tell whether this Polymer threads fit a bit common questions on Web Component standarts or there's some other more specific threads on it?

Anyway I wondering do Google & other search engines handle correctly all the content that is represented by web components?

Say if I we make component who treats completely whole the content in the page and presents by it-self all the stuff, e.g. headers, footres, menus content block and so on, can we expect in this case that all that stuff will apear in search engines indexes the same way as if we do all this things with plain html?

Thank's

[Eric Bidelman]

Hi Artyom,

It's perfectly fine to ask basic Web Components questions here.

SEO comes up enough that we added a FAQ entry. There's also a really good conversation on it in this thread that might be helpful.

Cheers,

Eric

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[Seth Ladd]

If you're interested in crawlability of AJAX-esque sites, you might find this page interesting: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

[humdid...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

Bit of a latecomer to this old thread, but I'm particularly interested about the FAQ entry Eric references.

This entry is pretty meaningless it stands, handwaving and saying "don't worry about SEO" is not going to cut it.  It *must* contain some references to guidelines.  I'm sure that crawlers can walk custom elements generated by the server and grovel around trying to discover inner elements it recognizes.  The FAQ leaves too much open to interpretation, as though we can populate an entire site via AJAX and custom elements (I'd love this to be true, but I just don't have any documentation to back me up).  It needs a bit of cleanup IMO.  Could some clarifications be added?  What is known to work?  Are there caveats? etc.  I would love to throw out the server side in favor of single-page AJAX sites akin to GWT's places, but the (widely disseminated) link that Seth provides requires server-side support, and doesn't really involve crawlers understanding AJAX at all.

The referenced topic that Eric posts doesn't come to any conclusion, nor shed any further light on the subject.  The best takeaway I got from it was that a) crawlers choke on random unknown tags, and b) ajax isn't supported by crawlers. In this case, the FAQ entry is completely contradictory, and shouldn't be present at all.  I'm confused?

[Eric Bidelman]

Have a look at https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/issues/222#issuecomment-25507605. There's some good disscussion going on there. In that comment I link to a video that shows search SEO work great with ajax sites (e.g. polymer-project.org) that use custom elements. The shadow dom part is incorrect because Google's crawlers use a version on WebKit that does not use native shadow dom. However, it's able to run JS and see the composed tree.

That said, also just added an experimental feature that let's you choose how/where your dom renders:
http://www.polymer-project.org/polymer.html#createlighthdom

[Matt]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the update!  I'd still heavily recommend that you expand the FAQ section to include some of this information, (even just raw links to these discussions is gold dust w.r.t SEO), since it's rather vacuous at the moment. I'll give these a thorough go over the weekend... I may post back here with further questions, but I think you may have just rocked my (and many other's) world, even without shadow-dom.

Keep up the good work!

[Eric Bidelman]

Thanks Matt. Feel free to fire back with questions. 

I've recently started to investigate this stuff myself. We'll update docs and FAQ entries

when things settle a bit more and there's hard evidence and examples to point to.

The video and the [lightdom] feature are a start to that, but there's a lot more exploration

that can be done in this area.

Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692

[adi....@gmail.com]

Hello,

We are planning to switch to Polymer for several websites. Unlike some other frontend libraries, Polymer doesn't support server-side rendering of components. This has a serious impact on the SEO friendliness of websites using it. And when I refer to search engines, I don't mean just Google, but "anything that crawls" :)

What are your recommendations to handle as best as possible the SEO issue?

Thank you,

Adrian