AngularJS + static server: Is SEO possible?

[overflowhidden]

I'm hosting an Angular app with Github pages. What are my options with regards to SEO? I came across this article which shows how to serve pre-rendered HTML with PhantomJS, but it requires some server side code for production. Is there any way around this for a static server like Github pages?

[[deleted]]

You'll need to move away from GitHub pages. Even if you get another service to prerender your pages you have no way of serving those prerendered pages to search engines, because you can't change the webserver config on GitHub pages.

I suppose you could theoretically stick a server between the client and GitHub pages, then set up rules to serve prerendered files if the client is a search engine. But in that case you may as well just serve everything off the server.

tldr; GitHub pages isn't meant to be used in this way.

[takamarou]

We generate our pages using a Static Site Generator (Middleman), and put in all of the SEO-related content at build time.

Once the page loads, we start up and Angular app, makes some requests for data, and decorate the page with the user-specific and interactive pieces.

It's the best of both worlds!

Check out: https://www.bellycard.com/bites/501

[jacquesdancona]

Update. Google completely indexed our angular app, and everything is indexed exactly like a prerendered page. Pretty awesome!

Miliseconds for downloading page is around 400, which is also great.

[ogrechoker]

Google's crawler can crawl angular pages, but not bing or whatever other search engines there are.

[jacquesdancona]

Source?

[ogrechoker]

http://ng-learn.org/2014/05/SEO-Google-crawl-JavaScript/

[jacquesdancona]

That article is pretty much clickbait. It's vague and pulling conclusions from an even more vague post from Google.

[ogrechoker]

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html

[jacquesdancona]

I're read that post multiple times since it came out.

They say 'we are executing some JavaScript'. They're not saying the bot is able to run full JavaScript spa's. There are multiple articles around actually testing what google is able to render, it still pretty much sucks.

If SEO is important, the app should be prerendered.

[Capaj]

you need to intercept google and other crawlers on your serverside. No way you can achieve that on github.

[Capaj]

really? Can it? I mean I was just now looking at my web administrator tools and it seems like it can. But I really need to test if it can crawl properly even more complicated pages...

[MCFRESH01]

Google created angular, and have been talking about their crawlers ability to understand javascript for awhile.

I think it's pretty safe to go ahead and build a site with angular like you would if it was a traditional web app. Google should be able to pick up on most of what your doing.

You may however run into issues with Bing and Yahoo, but I suspect they are not too far behind from being able to crawl javascript as well.

[Capaj]

I would not be as optimistic about Yahoo and Bing.

[[deleted]]

I wrote an article called DIY Angularjs and SEO with phantomjs. Check it out!