SEO and dynamic content

[LesleyPaone]

I am working on a project right now and I am looking for some advice on the SEO implications. The site is an e-commerce site and on the category pages it is using an external call to retrieve the products after the page is loaded. How it works is all content on the site is loaded, then after that a js script appends an ID and loads all of the product information. I am unsure how Google will see this, anyone have any insights?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Have you run Google's fetch and Render tool to test and see what Google actually sees through the render process? That's a quick way to often determine what's happening.

[LesleyPaone]

I haven't it is on a dev site that has no GWT property associated with it.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Ah yes - that's a challenge.  From experience, I know that Google is "mostly" good at seeing and factoring in dynamically generated content when a page is coded to ensure the dynamic content is inserted into the DOM (Document Object Model).  There's even a good article about this concept over at SearchEngineLand - written by Adam Audette - someone I respect as an advanced expert in the industry.

However, even though that's the case in my experience and based on what Adam's team found, the only ultimate test I personally trust, really is Google's fetch and render system.

[LesleyPaone]

Thanks for that. It looks like we might be ok by what the article says. We are hooking into Algolia to display the products and remove the load from the server. It uses one of the insertion methods that they tested so that makes me happy.

[AlanBleiweiss]

yeah their tests were a big help in my own confidence level.  Just understand that its still wise to test as soon after live-launch as possible. I hate nasty surprises that come from Google's system...

[LesleyPaone]

Totally, I hope there are no issues though, it would be a mess.