JavaScript SEO

JavaScript SEO is the work of making sure Google can read a site that builds its own pages inside the browser. Plenty of modern sites are made that way, so the page arrives almost empty and the words, the prices and the photos appear a second later. That second is short for a visitor, and it is the whole problem for a search engine.

The trouble starts because Google sends a small program to fetch your page, and it gets whatever the server hands over first. If the server hands over an empty shell, that shell is what gets stored, so your text is there for people and missing for Google. Shops have launched a handsome new site and watched their visits halve inside a month for exactly this reason.

Rendering is the plain word for filling that shell in, and a visitor's phone does it in about a second. Google does it too, but on a later pass, and it never promises when that pass will come. On a large catalogue the gap can mean weeks before a product page shows up in results, and sometimes the page never shows up at all.

The repair is ordinary rather than exotic, because the server can send the finished words together with the page, which developers call server-side rendering or pre-rendering. Same design, same site, only the page arrives complete. It adds a little to the build and it protects the visits you already pay for. That is why Linkysoft treats it as part of a web application project rather than an extra line on the invoice.

So here is the exact question to ask before you sign anything. When Google asks for this page, does the reply already contain the text, or does the text appear only after the code runs? Ask for the answer in writing, because a supplier who understands the question answers it in one sentence, and one who talks around it has also told you something.

You can check a live site yourself in half a minute. Open the page, right-click, choose view page source, then look in that window for a sentence you can see on the screen. If the sentence is not there, Google is doing extra work to find your words, and money spent on search work is leaking away. Linkysoft raises this in the first meeting for any new website, because deciding now costs far less than rescuing a launch later.