SEO and AngularJS

[Romain]

Hi

I am actually writing a website using angularJS, and I am wondering
how Google will see it.

The website is actually hosted on github : http://soufflez-du-vert.github.com/

And if I want to do server side templating I need to understand ruby
(because github use ruby )


I like the idea of being able to create a website only using HTML, CSS
and Javascript.
It is very easy to start coding, to host and to share with others.

But the point is SEO, how Google will see my web page?
I did the test on Google Webmaster, and the google bot only see my
index.html (the layout, not the content).

Do you have solutions about it ?

What do you think of the hashbang '#!' ?

Cheers

Romain

[Misko Hevery]

You can get more info here: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html

Bot the short answer is that google will not see it unless you do some extra not-so-simple stuff on the server. We are thinking about pre-processing on the server to answer this question, but so far we are just talking about it and there are no  concrete plans.

Sorry, angular, is more ment for internal content (like Gmail), not SEO crawl-able content.

-- misko

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[Igor Minar]

Hi Romain,

We followed these instructions to make our docs site crawlable:
http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html

/i

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Romain <romain.p...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Filirom1]

Ok thank you guys.

I just read the google instructions, and it will be easier for me to
do the templating on the server side using the github builtin
features.

Thanks

Romain

[daslicht]

Any Progress regarding Search Engine Index-ability ?
Such things should be built in a modern Framework

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[Adam Parrish]

I just wanted to bump this post. 

I had also read this and sent it out to my team on the project I am working with. 

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

After sending it, I was told this is actually widely accepted as bad practice, see the links below that were sent to me in an email from the senior JS team member and also the architect (esque) person who can deny us the right to use Angular. 

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/09/Hash-Blecch

See here where Twitter is working to abandon hashbangs....

http://www.netmagazine.com/news/twitter-hashbang-walloped-121992


Anyways as a result we looked at NodeJS as a method of somehow "compiling" and evaluating all the output that would normally occur browser side in Angular to make sure that when a crawler hits our site it will be served up with nicely formatted semantic HTML. This approach does not seem trivial so barring some serious research on our end I doubt we will be using it. 

It did get me to thinking though, why are we (angular users) trying to come up with some workaround solution when it should just be part of the framework. How could we go about helping add something to the Angular framework that would solve this. Would Igor or another member be willing to guide us towards the right place to try to make a contribution? I think that for public facing consumer sites you are going to have a hard time getting wide adoption for Angular without some support for SEO. I greatly want to use this framework, but I do think that it could be the silver bullet for the major media company I work with that could prevent us from getting to use it in favor of some server rendered static solution (blech....2001!).

Alright Hopefully someone reads my post and finds time to guide us in the right way. 

[Witold Szczerba]

Hi,
I see it like this: AngularJS is a solution for (web) applications.
Again: applications.

So, it is a solution to replace (in some degree) technologies like:
- WinForms (works only in current Windows environment),
- Java Swing, WebStart and JavaFX (works only in JavaSE environments),
- Flash (works only in flash-enabled environments),
- GTK, Qt, you name it...

AngularJS lets us write regular apps running in any web-enabled
environments. So one can create an application (again: application)
which is distributed in companies or web-wide as an URL, or it can be
wrapped in WebStart/Swing/JavaFX, Qt or WinForms with web-engine, so
it is easy to write application once and then port it to other
environments.

For creating some indexable web pages one needs a server-side
technology providing actual HTML pages, not executable applications.
AngularJS is not about server-side, it is a client-side solution.

I think it is possible to create some server-side solutions for a
content to be easily indexable and available as an URL for a front-end
application, but I believe it is _not_ an AngularJS job to address
it... isn't it?

Regards,
Witold Szczerba

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[Adam Parrish]

Witold:

I agree that there is a huge difference between "applications" and "web sites". Unfortunately there is a desire to produce customer facing "applications" that are SEO friendly because they make content like movies or television shows or even news events consumable by search engines and thus able to be found by their customers via Google.

I also think Angular is an amazing framework and that's why I severely hope that the framework developers would be willing to give some guidance on how we can improve it to be more SEO friendly. There are a lot of Flash/Flex applications that have been built that suffered from SEO issues (and much criticism from a lot of marketing / business folks within major organizations). Those could all be migrated to Angular, but only if the argument against it's SEO'ability is infallible. 

I see your opinion, but the framework won't be able to proliferate to a large number of external applications and those apps instead will be built in server-side technologies. If the goal of Angular is to appeal to internal behind the firewall applications then by all means - leave SEO off the list of priorities. If they want it to be customer facing and appeal to "web-site" developers that build dynamic "web-applications" it might be worth putting some effort in on SEO. 

-Adam 

[daslicht]

Meteor now claims to maintain Search Engine Indexability by using PhantomJs to create HTML Snapshots

[Christoph Burgdorf]

I wrote a simple grunt task to make fetching html snapshots an easy build step

https://github.com/cburgdorf/grunt-html-snapshot

[Arturo Hernandez]

On Saturday, August 4, 2012 4:50:13 PM UTC-5, Witold Szczerba wrote:

Hi,
I see it like this: AngularJS is a solution for (web) applications.
Again: applications.

AngularJS is a leading edge technology and the "rules" that applied before may not apply the same way. The boundary between Applications and websites is now blur. Someone will make the first Angular based Blog. And that someone will have to figure this problem out. I also think that this would be better made and supported by google.

My vote is not to think on the old terms but in terms of solutions and what users need/want.