PWA for Desktop Site (Ecommerce)

[Rajesh.Prajapati]

Hi Folks,

Need guidance about using PWA on desktop site. As I know PWA is basically used for mobile site to engage visitor more and let them surf your site like an app.

Would it be good SEO practice to use PWA on desktop site(E-commerce site) by calling everything through Javascript and let google Crawler cache only site logo and Hide everything else?

[Asif.Dilshad]

As per my experience, Google want to crawl each and everything which visitors are consuming. Showing different types of content for Google bot (or hide) and normal visitors termed as clocking. Google loves to penalize website using clocking practice.

So my Recommendation is to avoid hiding anything from Google & suggest you to use simple dev or html5 based website instead of JS to make Bots life bit easier.

On a side note, your website will not be rank if you hide the content.

[Rajesh.Prajapati]

Thanks for your response. I totally agree with you about clocking. But my question is about using PWA for an E-commerce site? like Flipkart using it?

[bridget.randolph]

Hi Rajesh,

Based on what you've described, it sounds like a desktop PWA could be a good way to go! But I would avoid hiding any content from Google crawlers. Instead, check out these articles for some guidelines on how to optimize a PWA site for SEO:

• https://moz.com/blog/introducing-progressive-web-apps
• https://searchengineland.com/google-progressive-web-apps-mobile-experience-seo-259866
• https://www.keylimetoolbox.com/news/technical-seo-progressive-web-apps-pwa-javascript-ajax/

Also, be aware that PWAs are not supported by all browsers, so before you go forward with that approach and ditch a regular website, make sure you look into what browsers your customers are using and ensure that all browsers which are used by a significant percentage of your audience have a supported experience. Hope this helps!