Generating html for SEO

Question

I found this article http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcsq25m_04k4cmgfd on generating html on server side for spider. What do you folks think about using this technique to serve different content depending on the user-agent?

Any reference articles, or advice you can share on the best way to do seo on gwt? I did read up on pro gwt2.0 techniques, but seem to me to be a bit of overkill.

Launch

Answer 1

Our company's website and everything we publish are GWT-based, and completely indexed by google. We use methods from AJAXCrawling. This is the best method I've seen so far.

Kosiur

Answer 2

We also had this problem developing joobili.com Honestly it was not easy, but I think the solution we have now is good.

We don't serve different content to search engines, because that is called cloaking, and google does not like it.

For every page we have an html version (honestly that is not a big deal, you don't have to deal with design at all, just put some content and links on the page).

You can use the tag for displaying this content. You can also speed up thing a bit, if you provide the initial content also in object form on the page. For that we use a slightly modified version of the kiyaa frameworks object serializer.

We also use gwt 2.0-s codesplitting mechanism, and this makes the loading of the homepage a lot faster.

Of course you have to make sure that the content you provide for the search engines (browsers without javascript) correlates to the one you provide to users.

Best - Istvan - inepex.com

Newish

do u mean u create static html version of the page with link? – Launch

+1 for no cloaking. Doing that can get you cleared from the main index. This is a Bad Thing(tm). – Guido

Sorry, I did not have notifications on, so I did not see the question. The links will be the same for the users and for the bots. Actually page refresh happens when you navigate to another page. But it is very fast, as every javascript gets cached. If you are still interested and have any specific question feel free to ask. Now I have notifications on:) And take a look at joobili.com with disabled javascripts, that will clarify things – Newish

Answer 3

The main problem is that search engines don't like it when you use different output when crawled vs visited "in person" by a browser, unless you provide a link on your app in the tag to the said html generated page.

also, the performance problems of using GWTTestcase to render html could be catastrophic given that it is not tuned for performance (but for testing and debugging) - in fact, crawlers tend to hit sites more than users do in a short time, and you might find that your CPU gets maxed out by search engines.

So far, there hasn't been any satisfactory solution to this problem unfortunately.

Puritanism

i agreed on this. do u know any other way to generate html beside gwttestcase ? what if, i use httpclient to parse localhost javascript? – Launch

hhmm...not sure about that either. i think even though its good to follow a DRY principle, it may be necessary to duplicate some presentation logic and just create a plain html only view. – Puritanism