Discussion on Google and JavaScript scripts reveals concerns about Discourse’s handling of JavaScript processing and its potential impact on SEO. Agnieszka_Jaskiewicz notes that Discourse uses dynamic rendering as a workaround, but this might become a form of cloaking when Google can fully process JavaScript. zogstrip clarifies that the dedicated crawler view is not cloaking since it displays the same content. However, Agnieszka_Jaskiewicz believes this workaround may negatively impact page performance metrics.
zogstrip proposes a strategy to automatically redirect Google Bot to the application view once confident in Google’s crawling capabilities. In contrast, codinghorror disputes the SEO advisors’ concerns, citing past negative experiences with SEO “experts.” Agnieszka_Jaskiewicz also shares concerns about the website’s speed limit due to JavaScript. codinghorror explains that Discourse, as a JavaScript app, trades first-run time for fast subsequent page loads.
Hi guys,
We’re running our forum on Discourse (on a subfolder), our SEO specialists made an analysis on it. Besides the speed of the website, they have one more concern about JavaScript processing. For now, Discourse uses dynamic rendering as a workaround, but what are your plans for the future, when Google will fully handle processing JavaScripts and DR becomes simply a form of cloaking?
By “dynamic rendering”, I suppose you mean we have a dedicated crawler view that doesn’t use JS? That’s not cloaking since it’s the exact same content.
You’re serving almost the same content for both human and crawler-only views, with completely different functionality around that content. This is kind of okay at the moment. However, as soon as Google feels comfortable enough with JS, it will inevitably become a form of cloaking - this already having a “workaround” status and possibly impacting page performance metrics that jointly constitute a Google ranking signal.
With Google moving to an evergreen bot, it’s our belief that moment is not really far away and we’re curious about your strategy should the above happen.
Once we’re confident that Google is crawling our application as well as our crawler view, we’ll just automatically redirect Google Bot to the app instead of the crawler view.
We believe your SEO advisors are wildly off base here. We have had a lot of bad experiences with SEO “experts” that don’t know what they are talking about.
Discourse is a JavaScript app, so it trades first run time for insanely fast subsequent page loads. The first hit requires the JavaScript app, Discourse, to be downloaded to the browser.
