Angular.js + Crawlers

[JoshKimber]

I am working with a site that recently deployed Angular.js on the site.  From an SEO standpoint its a little more tricky than we thought.  We have deployed a couple updates to render pages for the bots but we not seeing changes in Moz weekly reports.

When it comes to Angular.js, will the Moz bots read/access the site the same as the other major engines?  I'm trying to figure out if our deployments are working or if there's something off in the Moz reports.

Thanks.

[Moz.HelpTeam]

Hello, Josh

Currently our crawlers do not process any kind of javascript found on pages (including pages created with angular.js.)  I don't if the major search engines have this restriction or not.

For moz's crawlers, this means that links created through AJAX or other javascript will not be picked up.  Links appearing in static content, including those within

<noscript>tags, should be noticed and indexed.  Be aware that even if you've already made changes exposing links in the page's static content, it can take up to a week for the campaign crawl to catch up.</p> <p>Hopefully that answered your questions!  Let us know if you have any more.</p></noscript>

[AlanMosley]

What do you mean by "We have deployed a couple updates to render pages for the bots" that sounds like clocking?

[SEO-Enlighten]

Static rendering is not cloaking. It's a very common practice that Google actually recommends. The issue with angular js is that everything is code based. If you were to look at the code all the pages would look the same. In fact, MozBot sees this as every page is duplicate content.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/html-snapshot

It would be nice to see the MozBot act more like Google-bot.

[KevinDunne]

Is there still no update to this by MOZ?

A number of sites I work on are using Angularjs pushstate. Is there a way to point moz bot to the escaped fragment static pages?

[jmh2015]

With the current direction of web development this is something that needs to be addressed. Google has already confirmed that they are in fact crawling Javascript based sites.

Reference:
http://ng-learn.org/2014/05/SEO-Google-crawl-JavaScript/
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

The solution in this case is an HTML snapshot which, you could roll your own, but there are services like https://prerender.io/ that can do it for you.

This doesn't quite help the case for Moz Bot, maybe the HTML snapshots do work here - I haven't tested it yet. Either way, Javascript is becoming more and more a dominant language to code up websites. I hope Moz recognizes this because this toolset is awesome and I'd love to continue using it.

[SEO-Enlighten]

Within prerender you are able to determine which user agents will receive the HTML snapshot. It is here that you can add rogerbot. This is allowing Moz to crawl the site as if they were Google and receive the HTML snapshot version.

Additionally, you can always use the fetch as bot function within Webmaster Tools, to see exactly what is being presented/indexed.

[gparashar]

I am using prerender to cache/render static pages to crawl agents but MOZ is not able to crawl through my website (http://www.exambazaar.com/). Hence it has a domain authority of 1/100. I have been in touch with Prerender support to find a fix for the same and have also added dotbot to the list of crawler agents in addition to Prerender default list which includes rogerbot. Do you have any suggestions to fix this?

List: https://github.com/prerender/prerender-node/commit/5e9044e3f5c7a3bad536d86d26666c0d868bdfff

Adding dotbot:
prerender.crawlerUserAgents.push('dotbot');