Hi all - given that Google has deprecated the AJAX crawling specification that Meteor’s spiderable package is based on, it might be a good time to think about deprecating the spiderable package altogether. Search engine crawlers (like Google’s) have gotten much better at handling javascript based applications, and there are now several better options for SEO goodness, like pre-rendering services (e.g. Prerender.io - recommended in the Guide’s Enabling SEO section and supported out of the box with Galaxy), server-side rendering techniques, etc.
Can anyone think of a compelling reason(s) to keep the spiderable package active? A few important things to note:
- The package itself hasn’t received any significant updates in quite a while;
- Deprecating it would help remove a small amount of support burden from the Meteor team (letting them focus on other great things!);
- Production applications that are currently using
spiderablewould still be able to use the last non-deprecated version of the package through version pinning.
Let the discussion begin - thanks!