Coming from the Python/Django universe, I discovered Node.JS, Express + EJS and I have a big crush on those techs (mostly for the deployment part).
To practice and keep the pleasure to discover them, I’d like to make a blog-like project. It will be mostly static content with big articles for SEO and some dynamic functions, each article page must have a "true" slug like www.site.com/my-article.
I just found a documentation on how to do SSR with Express+EJS : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/node-js-server-side-rendering-ssr-using-ejs/
I’d like to know if some of you have some feedbacks on that type of implementation for live projects. Is it indexed well by Google ? Did you see some SEO issues ?
Many thanks 🙂
2
Answers
Googlebot can crawl, process and render JavaScript based websites, whether client side or server side rendered. Googlebot crawls the web using a headless evergreen Chrome. It’s still best to render server side for performance depending on your specific site needs.
EJS is SEO friendly. You can customise all core SEO elements of your page/app so the GoogleBot can crawl it. In the end it all depends on how good your technical/onsite SEO is. I haven’t got a problem with GoogleBot crawling my site. You must be careful to include correct technical SEO on your site at the beginning of development so you won’t have problems later when site will be visible to public.
If you aren’t sure about quality of your technical SEO you can use Google Lighthouse in DevTools (F12 or Ctrl+Shift+I) to check for the problems. Lighthouse will give you a better prospective of how GoogleBot crawls your page.
You need to check only SEO category. Device is optional. Then you click on "Generate report" and wait for the results.
The Dream would be:
More on how to use Lighthouse https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse#devtools