Nice writeup. But a large part of the main point seems to be surprise that client-side rendering isn't going to be indexed by search engines:
> It occurred to me that the hype around client-side rendered apps
> is still alive and kicking. It’s not the first time I’ve heard
> server-side rendering negatively referred to as an “old school” technique.
and ...
> Chalk that up to my ignorance, believing the client-side rendered
> app-of-the-future hype, and not caring about SEO until the organic
> traffic numbers came in.
This should not be a surprise. Obviously, if you only render content on the client, then search engines aren't going to see any of it. Client-side-only-rendered applications should only be for private pages, user's workspaces, and web applications — pages that a search engine will never see, regardless.
Thanks Jeremy. You're right and the point is obvious in hindsight.
I think the end of your comment should be shared with others; for those that are eager to try, but not fully aware of the consequences of client-side rendered apps.
I'd like to include your statement somewhere in the post to further emphasize the point; I hope that's okay. Thanks!
One solution is to detect Googlebot and render the page server-side in a headless browser, and send the generated HTML instead of the full JS app. You could even cache the generated HTML to S3 to speed up pageload, which Google likes.
Of course you can use backbone.js apps without losses of SEO. You need to render versions for the crawler. Google crawls ajax sites perfectly, if implemented correctly.
