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by phkahler 2509 days ago
>> Google's spider can execute JS, while others do not.

So Google is enabling the excess of JS we see today? Sites wouldn't do that if it couldn't be indexed by Google.

2 comments

Yes, they would. They'd just use NextJS or similar to push down a static skeleton that minimally covers the crawler. (My current company has to provide data to the Facebook crawler and that's what we do.)

Nothing prevents a site from doing that and just loading JS afterwards. Or from still being basically read-only without JS. Which might be an improvement...except within epsilon of zero people care in the first place and Google is building software for a rather larger proportion of the market than that, so it's an improvement for what's barely an audience.

Nobody is really "enabling" it except for a browser. And that's not changing. The shirt-rending is becoming tiresome.

I'd be curious to know why your company specifically targets large-market crawlers like that, instead of just making things crawlable. It feels like leaving money on the table when you overfit your stack to one market.

It's a shame you find it "tiresome" when people insist on retaining their own opinions, but your exhaustion is not particularly relevant.

We need to build shareable landing pages. We share via Instagram and Facebook (for now). We use NextJS because they do provide static rendering that covers what we care about and are likely to care about anytime soon.

And you can have whatever opinion you want; nobody’s saying otherwise. But the constant whining about nothing — and it is nothing — is exhausting.

Yet another reason to support other search engines. I haven't used Google in years, and I haven't had any real problems.