

Ask HN: How can react's SEO argument hold up? - arisAlexis

I have read in a lot of comparisons and tutorials that react has the advantage of being SEO friendly because you can better render the first page on the server. 
How is that even an argument when the maker of angular is the absolute dominant leader of search engines?
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hummlas
The problem was that until recently googles crawler didn't execute JS at all,
it only looked at the markup received directly from the server. That meant
that, to google, your SPA looked like an empty page since it's rendered on the
client. That's why being able to render your SPA on the server so you can send
the markup with your first request was necessary for SEO.

Google have started executing JS now though, so it's able to crawl your SPA
site even if they're not server-rendered. However if you want a good ranking
on other search engines other than google you still need server-side
rendering.

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detaro
What does Google making Angular have to do with how crawable Angular pages
are? Are you saying that Google's crawlers have optimizations for Angular
pages, or that Angular is also very well suited for server side rendering? I
don't get the argument, sorry.

Also, Google is not the "absolute dominant leader" everywhere, so
compatibility with other search engines can matter a lot.

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arisAlexis
I am saying that Google can at any time make angular crawable if it wishes so.
Having two main products incompatible is not very common or wise and I think
they will do it soon

