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Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

blog.workhere.io

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Re: Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

#71

Post by ssorallen »

scotth wrote: post #30
ssorallen wrote: post #22

> Single page apps are not a new concept, but up until now they were typically a bad solution for public websites that depend on hits from search engines If your users (I'm talking humans, not bots) have to download a mountain of JavaScript and execute it before seeing any content, your site is slower than it could be for everyone. We should stop saying that "single page apps", i.e. sites rendered in JavaScript in a…

Doesn't it all depend on how long they spend on the site? If it's one page and bounce, sure, that's a terrible experience. More pages than that? Now we're starting to see savings.

If you serve a rendered page of HTML with CSS links, browsers can progressively render the page as it is downloaded. Users will notice that on the first page load, particularly on higher latency connections where round trips for resources like JavaScript files are expensive.

Re: Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

#72

Post by cbr »

workhere-io wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #7

One potential problem here is that google will use this to widen the gap between it and the 'one page apps' web and other search engines (such as duckduckgo) that can't match it in resources. How strong of an advantage that will be in the long run is uncertain, I would rather see a web that ships pages with actual content in them than empty containers for a variety of reasons (most of which have to do with accessibil…

One potential problem here is that google will use this to widen the gap between it and the 'one page apps' web and other search engines (such as duckduckgo) that can't match it in resources. There are free and open source tools available that would help search engines parse pages containing JS (PhantomJS comes to mind).

It's not just tools, it's the cost of all that parsing and executing in a mock browser environment.

Re: Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

#73

Post by PinguTS »

The single page app has another _huge_ drawback.

The reload via JS fails silently, when you are on a bad Internet connection, like I am currently here in Nepal. You can not simply do a reload, like with a simple HTML page.

For example, Facebook is here unusable, because of the same issue. It works only, when you request the mobile site of Facebook in the browser.

So please, get rid of that damn JS, if you care about your user base and usability.

BTW: that problem also happens on bad hotel Wifi in the US.

Re: Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

#76

Post by CMCDragonkai »

Not every single search engine will be able to scale a JS virtual machine for all the pages they need to index. There are also social network bots that you might like supporting such as Facebook and Twitter which will not be able to crawl javascript either.

At any case, if you want to have a solution to this SEO problem now, I created SnapSearch (https://snapsearch.io)

Re: Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

#77

Post by frik »

jacquesm wrote: post #7

One potential problem here is that google will use this to widen the gap between it and the 'one page apps' web and other search engines (such as duckduckgo) that can't match it in resources. How strong of an advantage that will be in the long run is uncertain, I would rather see a web that ships pages with actual content in them than empty containers for a variety of reasons (most of which have to do with accessibil…

duckduckgo is mainly a meta search engine (relies on search API of Yahoo that relies itself on Bing, Yandex, etc.). Plus it shows some related snippets from Wikipedia and other data-sources.

Several well known web search engines are now defunct or switched to meta-search business (like Yahoo with Bing data).

There are only a few international/world-wide search engines with a crawler:

Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Gigablast, (Archive.org/Wayback Machine)

Re: Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

#78

Post by adamconroy »

Somewhat off topic, but how do single page apps deal with people hacking the JS? For example, if as a particular user I am only allowed to perform certain functions within the app, and that functionality is contained in the JS, then it doesn't seem like it would be very hard to modify the JS to enable the functionality I shoudn't be allowed to use.

Re: Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development

#79

Post by ailox »

adamconroy wrote: post #78

Somewhat off topic, but how do single page apps deal with people hacking the JS? For example, if as a particular user I am only allowed to perform certain functions within the app, and that functionality is contained in the JS, then it doesn't seem like it would be very hard to modify the JS to enable the functionality I shoudn't be allowed to use.

Usually the functionality of the app exists in the backend, which would be server side. No matter what you do on the frontend, there should be no way for you to trigger actions in the backend you were not authorized to perform.
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