Category doesn't appear for search engine web spiders?

[HAWK]

Continuing the discussion from SEO compared to other well known tools:

@codinghorror

It is very easy to crawl Discourse… try disabling JavaScript and see for yourself.

Topic List with JavaScript disabled

<img src=“//assets-meta-cdck-prod-meta.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/original/1X/343249ef42d0e64f316d4f7f6d5745702c0f97a5.png” width=“629” height=“685”>

Topic with JavaScript disabled

<img src=“//assets-meta-cdck-prod-meta.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/original/1X/4019ff74bcc5b74842bae2c7b7004bd62e9463a3.png” width=“690” height=“426”>

Apologies for dredging up an old topic, but our SEO guy has some questions that I can’t answer, so I’m hoping you can arm me with some info @codinghorror

Specifically, the noscript version when rendered, does not have all the information (links) that you see in the dynamic version eg. the Forums homepage. With js disabled we are just seeing the links to topics - no category navigation.

He’s trying to get his head around how Google discovers all the topics and categories if it’s unable to see the category links when js is disabled. Is there any documentation or case study?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Well, the /categories page also works with JS disabled:

so presumably Google is navigating there. But you’re right that we don’t duplicate topnav, and arguably we should be showing category alongside topics in the JS-disabled case.

@neil can you add category to the topics in the js-off scenario? maybe like so:

Adding own avatar provider [dev] (11)

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

This is now complete. Great suggestion @hawk.