I'm curious how SEO will play into this trend of async UIs and JS frameworks.
In 2 of the example studies given (Amazon and Yahoo!), we're talking about content/commerce sites where rankings matter.
If you reduce load time by Xms and increase conversions by Y%, your net gain could still be negative if you get bumped to page 3 for important searches and lose traffic.
Do any of these JS frameworks consider SEO and have appropriate features built-in? (I'm thinking of things like hash fragments)
Can someone who runs a content/commerce site that cares about SEO comment on this?
I'm about to launch a new version of my business's website today which incorporates the asynchronous UI concept while keeping SEO in mind.
I settled on building a JS-free version of the website using the templating system I've developed for the backend, and then loading in JS at the end of page load which replaces and rebuilds the site into an interactive UI for users with JS enabled.
Assuming Google doesn't try too hard to execute JS on the page, it should get a clean, "normal" version of the site, with all text & menus and everything else accessible, while users get something a little bit different (but with the same content).
We do the same thing. Our CMS delivers views based on the type of agent and whether JS is enabled or not. It allows our users who aren't able to handle all the fancy UI stuff (we have some blind users) to use the site without losing any functionality, much like Gmail static. With the proper design it's really simple to extend and add content this way.
this article is talking about UIs, and more specifically user-interaction driven interfaces. it shouldn't be relevant to SEO at all, because it concerns what happens after the page loads, not the initial page load (which is what the search engine sees)
A nice solution here is to have a 'traditional' application with new page loads for links, so that search engines can follow them. You then enrich this application with Javascript, placing click handlers on the links to replace their default action (loading a new page) with a similar action performed through Javascript/AJAX.
In 2 of the example studies given (Amazon and Yahoo!), we're talking about content/commerce sites where rankings matter.
If you reduce load time by Xms and increase conversions by Y%, your net gain could still be negative if you get bumped to page 3 for important searches and lose traffic.
Do any of these JS frameworks consider SEO and have appropriate features built-in? (I'm thinking of things like hash fragments)
Can someone who runs a content/commerce site that cares about SEO comment on this?