I know this is quite an older topic now, but as I have currently myself an interest in all the Discourse and SEO topic, and Nader seems to be around, let’s revive it.
I don’t like very much either that Discourse serves something different specifically to Google than what is served to everybody else. I always heard this was the 101 of things to NOT do, because Google doesn’t like that at all.
Wasn’t one of the problem, or even the main one, Discourse was seen as slow to load with JS enabled?
This has been worked around by serving a static version to Google and by displaying the “loading” animation to show something is appearing pretty quickly. “Something” yes, but not the information the user searched for and why he clicked on the link. This takes time to show. And by serving the JS version, Google would know it. While it is currently somewhat tricked to not know how long it takes.
Or am I wrong on this?
Is this a good way of doing? Does Google know nonetheless? For example from Chrome browser stats sent back. And does this maybe penalize ranking?