Angular 5 and Google index issues

[Michael Ben-Nes]

Hi,

3 weeks ago my client website (https://www.infogan.co.il) started to disappear from Google index after we upgraded to Angular 5.0.1

The website is using Universal so the source is pre-rendered successfully (checked with curl) but googlebot got an exception when tried to init the page. It was visible when we tried to fetch a page using the Google webmaster tools as all the pages where without content.

Later we discovered that googlebot use an old chrome (ver 42) to init the page so we added polyfills and the bug was fixed.

Now 3 weeks later most of the pages are still out of the index.
Is there a know issue in Angular5 that effect googlebot that we are not aware of?

We also started a topic at Webmaster Central Help Forum with more details and screenshots.

Thanks,
Miki

[Sander Elias]

Hi Michael,

I'm not aware of such an issue. I did ask around a bit and did not hear of anything relevant. Did you search/file an issue on the angular git repo? If there is indeed a relevant issue, that's the place where I would expect it to surface.

Regards

Sander

[Michael Ben-Nes]

Thanks for the tip Sander,

I will run further checks on the code and see if I can collect more insights. Then will see if a ticket is applicable

[Shooky Galili]

Hi. I'm working with Michael. 

It could be a good idea to report a bug if we had found one. The problem is that we didn't find such a bug - we only experience this indexing issue that makes no sense, so we suspect there's a bug.

It could really be great if someone in Google's Angular team could check this out. 

[Sander Elias]

Hi Shooky,

Well, you can file an issue anyway. As a possible bug. Perhaps there are some more developers experiencing similar issues. Opening an issue on this will raise awareness, and there will be a usable answer in there for you.

Regards

Sander

[Tito]

is there a way of emulating (in house) what google bot does (a stripped down version of google bot functionality) with ver 42 or chrome and then do the same with a newer version of chrome.

Actually google should provide a stripped down version of google bot to test things out in dev and qa and staging before running into issues in production!!!

[Michael Ben-Nes]

Well, Googlebot source is not open so the best we can do is to test the website with chrome ver 42. (which we did and it works as expected).

Assuming there is a problem with googlebot crawling the site. I would expect Google to be more transparent about it.

[Shooky Galili]

Update:

We opened an issue on GitHub 4 days ago. No comments yet.

A day before that we also upgraded to Angluar 5.2, which had no effect on our problem.

It's over a month now and we're pretty desperate. 

Any ideas guys?

[Tito]

Could this help you out?

https://geoffkenyon.com/angularjs-seo-crawling/

Not sure if you have

[Sander Elias]

Hi Shooky,

Can you link the issue you have opened? I will try to get some eye's on it.

Regards

Sander

[Shooky Galili]

Hi Sander,

Here it is https://github.com/angular/angular/issues/21625

Thanks!

[Shooky Galili]

Thank you Tito, but we already use Universal for prerendering and have XML Sitemaps, and everything worked perfectly until we upgraded to Angular 5.

[Shooky Galili]

So, the issue we opened on GitHub was closed by an admin because " it doesn't fall into the bug report or feature request category". 

He asked us to repost it on StackOverflow, which may be a good idea, but we already open a discussion here, a topic on the Webmaster Central Help Forum and another one on the JavaScript Sites in Search Working Group and it started to feel like shooting in the dark.

[Sander Elias]

Hi Shooky,

Hmm, that's not just an admin ;)

But please do as he asked, SO in combination with the #angular flag will get a lot more eyeball's as posting in here or even as opening an issue. 

Also, link it back in here, so I get some attention to your question. I will do what I can to get you the help you need. 

Regards

Sander 

[Shooky Galili]

Thanks Sander! We'll do exactly that and hope for the best...

[Sander Elias]

Hi Snooky

Did the answer from Filipe on your GH issue help you a bit? 

Regards

Sander

[Shooky Galili]

We checked out the issue Filipe referred to. The alleged bug is already fixed in Angular 5.2.0 which we upgraded to over a week ago. Note that in the last comment in GH IgorMinar make an argument why it makes sense that there was a change in Googlebot around December 11 when the problem started. 

[Shooky Galili]

 Seven weeks and counting...

We managed to get rid of the flashing "main" in our titles (on the browser tabs) a week ago. Cached versions render correctly. No change in indexing yet.

[Nitesh Luharuka]

Hi Shooky,

Did you manage to fix this by some way?