seo with phantomjs
01 Oct 2014
angularjs, seo, nginx, phantomjs, facebook share, node and sitemaps - in 60 minutes or less
when i was asked about how to make an angular site seo friendly, i was shocked to discover that
even though googlebot is supposed to support javascript, angular apps still have placeholders
where values should be, making your search result display as \{{title}}.
really? 2014 is almost over, and we have to deal with prerendering still? omg..
as i was getting dizzy with the thought of having some jade template engine in my beautiful mean stack code,
i decided to risk everything and write a solution with phantomjs.
you will not believe how simple it is
i was then shocked again to discover that there are services doing just that, and they charge a lot of money!
i was unimpressed by services like prerender.io
and what they offer. escpecially when i knew i was going to have a lot of pages soon.
and besides, why pay when it is so darn easy?
sharing in facebook doesn’t work too, so who cares about google crawler?
even if google has javascript support, i want to be able to share my pages on facebook and other social networks..
so i need a better solution.
in the next couple of articles i will talk in depth about how to add seo support for single page applications.
- about phantomjs - where i exaplain about phantom and show how to use it outside and inside of node server
- single page application crawling - where i explain a bit about how crawlers work and thus how the solution works
- hooking it all together - where we show how to generate sitemap at runtime and serve the prerendered version of the page