Blog app for Business, Corporate and IT professionals: SidKwakkel.com

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This is my own personal blog concerning Business, Tech and Corporate Governance Teams.

It is entirely written in Meteor. Enjoy, and don’t forget to subscribe :slight_smile:

Sid

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Alright, so I’ve had my site up for a few weeks and I have some impressions:

  • Despite having gadicohen:sitemaps package installed (which greatly helps with Google Search Console), it is taking a really long time for the search engines to index the site. We’re at 2 weeks, and it has only indexed 3 of the 5 pages. This could just be Google’s slowness.
  • Google does a poor job of indexing the site. I’m using Flow-Router and kadirahq-dochead package to set the page title of my posts to "Post - ", but Google indexes them as “Post - undefined” … this definitely sucks for my discoverability, SEO, etc. It will likely be a deal breaker.
  • When tweeting a blog post, Twitter can’t seem to render the site caption, so it defaults to a generic “Sid Kwakkel’s website” caption. Not ideal.

In the end, I think I will likely move away from Meteor for my blog site. While I really liked how fast it was to build… there are some real shortcomings. I don’t want to use prerender as there are limits to the number of pages.

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Kadira’s dochead is good at making your meta look good for a user, but obviously not so much for robots. When a bot hits our site, we re-route it to an SSR page where we don’t actually send any html until all of our data is ready and we can construct a proper header.

Similarly, when our content is shared socially or on something like slack, the SSR routes provide the meta information necessary to create the snippet, post, etc.

It is possible, but when there are so many blogging outlets that handle SEO for you, Meteor is probably not the easier route if SEO is a primary concern.

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Have you tried the Meteor Server Render package?

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I’m using flow-router and blaze so there is very little documentation out there for me to use server-render.

I’m trying meteorhacks:ssr with meteorhacks:picker . Having issues though. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

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Alright, well, I have SSR working now… we’ll see how the indexing goes now. Will report back.

7

Woot woot… Google is now indexing my blog posts with the correct title :grin:

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Well it’s not all milk and honey…
My google+, twitter, and linkedin cards look funny

Try the following at the console to see my meta tags

curl -H "User-Agent: Twitterbot" https://sidkwakkel.com/blog/xJwK4RjfbhMbtz3pS

This is an example of the Google+ card that is created. Any suggestions?

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