Is it possible for Google to render SPAs (angular in particular) without the use of a headless browser?
I have built a service purely in angular but I would like to make it possible to apply SEO.
Is it possible for Google to render SPAs (angular in particular) without the use of a headless browser?
I have built a service purely in angular but I would like to make it possible to apply SEO.
2
Answers
Now Google crawlers are able to render AJAX (Angular) sites: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html
But you can implement AJAX crawling scheme (deprecated): https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/learn-more
First of all, no, you can’t render an Angular page without the aid of an actual browser. It’s something that is coming in Angular 2 but for now we are stuck using PhantomJS or some headless Chrome or something if we want to create HTML snapshots.
However, as Alex already pointed out that is no longer needed for SEO reasons!
But, wait, there’s more
The reason I write my own answer is to point out that it IS still needed for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc 🙁
If a user shares a link to your site on Facebook (or Twitter, etc) their crawler will try to read your page and generate a preview. Unlike search engines these crawlers will not run Javascript, so the preview of your Angular page will look all broken.
If you want your previews to be dynamic you will still need the html snapshots for now.