One of the most popular JavaScript-based web application frameworks, AngularJS provides dynamic functionality for HTML extension to be able to create ‘single page applications’ for enhanced user experience. AngularJS was first introduced in 2012 and has gained a lot of popularity over the years due to its ability to create dynamic web pages which users can interact with in real time.
AngularJS is specifically useful in situations where a variety of images, data or other elements are present. Increasing the speed with which users interact with website products leads to higher conversion rates and increased traffic and revenue. However, search engines find it challenging to render content or links served using AngularJS. It can even hide your page content completely from search engines and significantly reduce your traffic.
Today, in this post, we consider the SEO challenges of AngularJS and the possible solutions to benefit from this framework without any limitations.
AngularJS SEO Tutorial
Javascript lets you do a lot and the introduction of AngularJS framework has made it more powerful and popular. But Javascript has always been one of the biggest enemies of SEO. Googlebot finds it challenging to render contents served through Javascript. The main problem is the ability to render internal navigation and indexable content into the HTML code for search bots to crawl and index. Google has made several attempts to improve its ability to crawl and index Javascript but it still faces challenges with indexing of AngularJS.
When AngularJS is used to render website pages and the search engine fails to index the pages correctly, the website suffers from a loss of organic search traffic and consequently, a loss in revenue.
But, search engines should see the elements of the page in the HTML source code to be able to index properly. One solution to overcome this problem is using a pre-rendering platform which crawls the web page and executes all javascript files. It hosts a cached version of your AngularJS page on their content delivery network and upon request from a search engine, it displays the cached version and the visitor is able to see the AngularJS page.
Overcoming AngularJS SEO Issues
The key to AngularJS SEO is pre-rendering. You should never leave the indexing of your site in the hands of the search engines. Always be aware of how the web pages are rendered for search engines. Here are some useful tools to make this easier.
- Search Engine Index – Perform a “site:[domain]” query with a search engine to check the latest cached version of any web page. Find the drop-down button at the end of the URL in the search results and click on Cache to see what the bot got with the recent crawl of your web page.
- Fetch as Google – This Google tool lets you test how Google renders a URL on your website. You can use this tool to find out whether the bot can access a particular page of your website, the way it renders the page and whether any page resources are blocked to it. Fetch as Google is designed to stimulate a crawl and render as done in normal Google processes. You can easily debug any crawl issues on your website with the help of this tool.
- Browseo – This tool allows you to view a webpage free of any distractions arising due to styles. It is a very useful app that not just renders all the page elements but also lists the total word count, important content such as keywords, title and meta description, internal and external links, SERP preview and Facebook and Twitter tags. It highlights all the data crucial for SEO and supports better SEO.
AngularJS SEO Friendly URLs
While it is crucial to pre-render your content, ensuring SEO-friendly URLs for your AngularJS pages is also an important component. This basically means avoiding the hash stuff in the URLs – one of the most effective options to render URLs in AngularJS. To be able to set up SEO friendly URLs, you should set the routing to HTML5 mode by configuring $locationProvider and setting $routeProvider.
In AngularJS, the $location service passes the URL in the address bar to make changes to the application and vice versa. Using the $locationProvider module and setting the HTML5 mode to true while defining the AngularJS application and configuring the routes sets up SEO-friendly URLs.
You should also ensure that you generate XML sitemaps including your canonical URLs and that they are submitted in the search console. This guarantees that the search engines are able to find and crawl all the important URLs for your website.
SEO Indexing
Generally, SEOs check the page source code to determine whether the content on the page is indexable. If it is in the source code, it should be good. Websites that rely on AngularJS often do not have much content in the source code. As the search engines do not perform well at indexing AngularJS content, you cannot rely on the source code to evaluate the performance of AngularJS indexing of a website. You need a solution to ensure that the SEO performance of the site does not decrease just because you render the content using AngularJS.
The solution is pre-rendering, which means creating an HTML snapshot that serves in the source code instead of relying on search engines to render the AngularJS pages. This resolves the issue of search engine not being able to index content hidden within a click and will facilitate indexing AngularJS content on your website. When you use pre-rendering, you should be able to view the content in the source code directly and need not use the ‘Inspect Element’ function of Chrome.
To create a pre-rendered version of your AngularJS pages, you should ensure that you use Angular2 and not the initial version of AngularJS. This is because Angular2 supports server-side rendering and allows you to easily create HTML snapshots to execute pre-rendering for SEO.
With Google being totally committed to supporting AngularJS, it will definitely prove to be a highly useful platform for creating more user-friendly, interactive websites. Use the strategies discussed here to make sure you do not sacrifice your organic search traffic while the service still evolves.