I am currently developing a single-page web application that is focused on functionality. It doesn't really have or need long paragraphs of text, and those that are there are loaded dynamically via javascript and AJAX.
Normally search engine optimization tips revolve around getting the right word count percentages, etc. But what are the best practices for SEO when your application is heavily reliant on AJAX? A landing page with descriptive text is not an option - it's important that users can immediately start using the application, and it's rather obvious what it does once it's loaded.
With meta tags fading in importance in modern search engines, is link-building the only solution or are there tricks to help search engines know what an AJAX-based web application is about?
Google has a written specification suggesting how you might make an AJAX web application better crawlable by their robots.
The fundamental principle is that you make a static html version of key pages, and let the crawler know these pages exist, and the relationships between them, using the #! url fragment syntax.
Somewhere you'll have to explain:
What so great about your app
How your app is working ("for dummies" style)
Who you are and why you did it
etc
You can use all this content to do SEO (no ajax is needed for that).
Forget about making ajax crawlable if you don't have any text inside your app anyway.
Related
I have developed a website using angularjs and web api.
The problem is that the ajax rendered content is not crawable by google. And no one can find the website using google search.
After reading many articles regarding this issue, including:
This one with all links of explanation going out,
Google ajax crawling protocol, and also stack over flow question, I couldn't find the proper solution. Those that mention asp.net solutions, are talking about mvc, and I need only the simple REST by web api, other articles are not talking about asp.net.
Is there any simple explanation?
I'm the one who asked this same question long ago, so I will answer from my experience:
Firstly, if all your content are accessible via unique URIs (including the hashbang if you use it), modern search engines should index it just fine. In fact Google can index javascript generated content now. You can try that via the Google Webmaster tool and see how your site is indexed.
Secondly, there are libraries that help you to serve parsed content to search engines if you need to, but in my case I didn't bother much with it since Google is indexing js nicely.
I've seen others ask this question, and maybe I'm missing something or this is outdated, but I don't see why AngularJS needs to be an issue with SEO.
Say you have a landing page and it has a bunch of links. Assuming you're using html5 mode in AngularJS (and I'm not sure that's 100% necessary) and something like ng-route then the links on the landing page can work both as "angular" (JavaScript) links and "old school" (full page load) links.
If you're a human user you can click a link and it will do angular magic and adjust the content without loading the full page. Ok, all fine.
But if you instead copy the link and paste it in a new tab or new browser, it will still work - assuming you've set up routes correctly.
I'm not an SEO expert by any stretch of the imagination, but as I understand it, having links that load pages and having those pages have real and useful content is the core of SEO, and done this way, AngularJS should work fine. The key thing to check is if you copy and paste the link (not just click it) that it works.
Non-SPA AJAX Partials for SEO
Sadly, 101% of the Angular SEO examples assume the use of a singe-page-application (SPA). My app is not a SPA. Currently, my stack is:
Node/Express - for routing and rendering Jade templates. The URLs are real, and don't use HTML pushstate, hash-bang or anything similar. for this reason, url-escaped-fragment won't work for me (I don't think)
Angular for communicating with my RESTful API(s)
My problem is that my page itself only includes pieces that are loaded via AJAX—the rest of page is rendered server side. Node/Express is not responsible for any of this logic, Angular pulls in the data that will be in my first h1.
Google Bot and similar see: <h1>{{this_unrendered_string}}</h1> which is no good.
Has anyone come up with any clever solutions for working around this scenario?
FWIW I found a service called SEO.js that will host a rendered version of any page I pass to it. If I could just tell GoogleBot and similar "Hey, don't use this page, use this page instead" But I'm not entirely sure how SEO feels about a different host serving content. Maybe some trickery could work here..
Google have documented an approach to "Making AJAX Applications Crawlable" here. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
Implementing this isn't completely simple (basically you have to run a headless browser and return the HTML snapshots in response to specially formatted requests by Google).
It's not a simple as just returning a snapshot when you detect GoogleBot, but doing it this way probably eliminates any risk of being penalized.
There are a few companies that offer this a service - I'm getting on well with this one: https://ajaxsnapshots.com - they say that Bing and Yandex (Russian search engine) support it too.
AjaxSnapshots have an API you can use to tell them when your page is ready to snapshot - you could call that after all of your client side rendering is done.
I am developing a site using asp.net MVC. I have used AJAX for paging,sorting dropdown fillup,showing different content on link click etc. I came to know that AJAX call is always against SEO and SEO is most important for my site.
Please suggest me ways to improve SEO of my site without removing AJAX.
You should have been using progressive enhancement from the start. Your site should work without JavaScript/Ajax being enabled. This way all users, including search engines, can get to your content. Then you should enhance your users' experience by adding JavaScript and Ajax to provide a better experience.
At this point you don't have a lot of options. You'll need to go back and make that content available without JavaScript. You can also use Google's crawlable Ajax standard, too, but that only works for Google and for a slightly more amount of work you can make every search engine, and every user, able to reach your content by not making JavaScript required to use your website.
We have web applications elgifto.com, roadbrake.com in which we used AJAX at many places, especially to update major portions of a page. All the important functionality of elgifto.com was implemented using AJAX. Now we realize a few issues due to AJAX implementation.
All the content implemented using
AJAX is not available to the SEO
bots and it is hurting the page rank
of our site.
Users will not be able to bookmark
some of the pages as they are always
available through AJAX.
When we want to direct the user from
one page through an anchor link to
another page having AJAX, we find it
difficult.
So now we are thinking of removing AJAX for these pages and use it only for small functionality such as something similar to marking a question as favorite in SO. So before going ahead and removing, we want to know expert's opinion on this. Thanks.
The problem is not "AJAX" per se, but your implementation of it. Just as a for instance, you can fix the 'bookmark' problem like google maps does it: provide a generated link for each state of your webapp.
SEO can befixed by supplying various of these state-links to the crawlers, either organically trough links in your site, or by supplying a list (sitemap).
If you implement 2, you can fix 1 and 3 with those links.
In the end you must figure out if the effort is worth it, and if you are not overusing AJAX ofcourse, but the statements you've made are not set in stone at all.
I'm costantly developing ajax based websites, with no problems for SEO at all. You just have to use it in the best possible way.
For example, I have a website with normal links pointing to normal webpages (PHP pages), this for normal navigation if a user doesn't have JS enabled. But if a user has JS enabled, a script will change the links behavior, only fetching the content of the page needed.
This way you still have phisycal separated webpages with all their content, which will be indexed as normal.
We're coming from GWT projects and because of problems with SEO not liking GWT for our next project we're going to move clear of GWT (mainly because seo is a high priority for this next project). In choosing a new framework, I'm looking at Wicket and liking what I've seen so far. I've only done a few tutorials, but in looking at the war layout (from these tutorials) it looks like most of the html pages are in the WEB-INF folder.
It this going to cause problems for SEO and search engines crawling through the sites files?
Ideally, I'd like to use Wicket with some AJAX and deploy to Google App Engine.
It does not matter if your .jsps (or whatever) are stored in /WEB-INF. It just means they cannot be accessed directly by going to http://webapp/path/to/jsp.
For SEO think about:
Meaningful URLs and link text (i.e. URLs should be similar to expected search engine queries)
Crawlable pages (make sure all your content can be reached by a non-JS enabled bot... i.e. don't make content only available through AJAX, for instance). A sitemap might help
Look into Wicket's Bookmarkable page links and UrlCodingStrategies for a very powerful combination to use in SEO. Basicly all your links and parameters can be encoded as/a/static/url, regardless of (changing) implementation on the backend.
if you project SEO is really important than you might reconsider using a lot of ajax since crawler wont execute javascript they are not gonna read all the return of your ajax calls... that being said the SEO quality of your site is not really based on the framework you will be using ... jsut always think about img alts, links, meta, title, h1 ... in every pages and you should be fine ... also always try to post links to your site on other websites to gain visibility and get importance for crawlers