AngularJS - What To Consider?

[Malika1]

Hi all,

I have a website which is going to be rebuild in AngularJS. It's a massive website that recieves a lot of traffic. As I am new to AngularJS and with less programming knowledge, I am not 100% confident about how to go about it.

I am requesting MOZers to please point me in the right direction to get the SEO right. What are the things to take care of? How it will impact the search engine rankings etc.

[Mobilio]

Rebuilding in Angular will effective nuke all search visibility of this site. I'm not kidding. You can see similar question here:
https://moz.com/community/q/index-problem

and answers there. Just open site in this question and see it's source (not DOM! Just HTML source that bot get). And you also will be shocked.

PS: I'm not saying that site with Angular can't rank and index. But it's relative harder comparing with pure HTML site.

[GreenStone]

A few things:

• One way to aid you in ensuring search engines can actually properly index your angular website would be to use a service such as  https://prerender.io/ - like many have before you.
• Another good resource with some examples of the roadblocks you might face: https://builtvisible.com/javascript-framework-seo/ - this will also outline some recommendations of how to tackle these issues.
• Compared to the typical HTML site, it will certainly be far more difficult. It will be doable, as long as one thing is done: test, test......and test.

[max.favilli]

While developing that new website with angularjs you need to keep in mind SEO and what crawlers do.

Put it in a simple way, you should always render the page server side at first load in a crawler friendly way, and use angular client side for UX.

To use AJAX to load content is bad for seo no matter what js framework/library you use, from old jquery to angular or react it's always the same story, don't load SEO valuable content through ajax, or crawlers will likely totally ignore it.

So, secure you are giving visitors and crawlers valuable SEO content right away on first load, server side, and use angular to manipulate it according to user actions.

And while doing that, don't be tempted to cloak, or google axe will hit you.

I have been developing websites using angularjs for years now, and always got great SEO results.

Good luck.