So I just noticed that Discourse serves a non-JS version of the site to Google.. I’ve been using JS to set the sites title, meta description, canonical, etc and seems google is getting really good at rendering client-side javascript ( I’m referring to my regular site, not discourse ) Is there a wa…

[image] stance455: I’ve been using JS to set the sites title, meta description, canonical, etc and seems google is getting really good at rendering client-side javascript Probably a good idea to explain why this is necessary. The out-of-box behavior within Discourse works fine for the majorit…

[image] Stephen: Probably a good idea to explain why this is necessary My apologies When I say I’m using JavaScript for the title, canonical and meta-description I mean for my regular website, not the discourse setup. I was just trying to convey my experiences with googlebot and JS I tried …

[image] stance455: Im also starting to grasp how much of discourse is an app Right. It’s all an app. And there is little chance that Google could make sense of it, so there would need to be a second app, just for Google, which is why it sends the static version.

Thanks for replying here @pfaffman .. [image] pfaffman: there is little chance that Google could make sense of it Just to scratch the itch, is there a way to test this? - Im just curious what the site will look like if we give google a try. They’ve started to really open up to the idea of cl…

[image] stance455: Just to scratch the itch, is there a way to test this? The source code is available, so you’d just change something there. I am pretty familiar with the code, but have no idea where to look. [image] stance455: SEO wise at least it makes sense to try I think that if …

[image] pfaffman: Do you really think that the Google bot is color blind It is actually totally color blind :wink: Quite many, even SEO experts, really thinks bots see a site same way as we see it on screen. Well, I’m kind of out of topic now.

[image] pfaffman: The source code is available, so you’d just change something there. I am pretty familiar with the code, but have no idea where to look. I was thinking of starting a new topic here on meta to discuss this (Im not familiar enough with this pull requests/ commit jargon on githu…

[image] stance455: I guarantee you, once this is fixed , all Discourse forums will see a huge jump in Google organic traffic It’s really easy to make claims like the above, particularly when by your own admission you don’t understand the inner workings nor design decisions which led to the cu…

[image] Stephen: you don’t understand the inner workings nor design decisions which led to the current state. I have a very broad idea, the app is Javascipt heavy and historically Google has had issues with JS. So you guys went with the simple non-JS we have now. My argument is to at least TR…

Googlebot is getting non-javascript version of the site

Development

Falco (Falco) October 25, 2023, 5:46pm 18

Thanks for sharing.

However, this reply reinforces our current approach, as it’s about getting the content indexed as fast as possible

Topic		Replies	Views
Disable or bypass feature detect for Googlebot (while serving JS app to crawlers) Support unsupported-install	7	3586	June 14, 2022
Can we have a conversation about SEO? Development	2	908	April 4, 2022
Google and JS scripts Support	6	812	September 4, 2019
Discourse noscript Support	3	764	October 23, 2018
Google May 4th Core Update impact on Discourse forums Community Building	102	10522	July 5, 2022

Googlebot is getting non-javascript version of the site

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