Something that has been plaguing me since I first put out my site is the fact that when I use Google Search Console to preview how Google sees my site I get very inconsistent results.
Sometimes it loads the page correctly. Sometimes it doesn’t load anything. But most commonly it will load the layoutTemplate of iron router, while not rendering the actual main content of the page (If this means anything, it has to retrieve mongo collection fetches before it can load that page, but I don’t think this should matter).
This is now severly impacting my search engine presence. I’m aware of stuff like “prerender” which attemps to take screenshots of your page and serve them to google. But not only is this service costly, it seems really hacky.
Also the fact that I can get Google to successfully load a preview of my webpage SOMETIMES makes me think that I’m close.
I am using “prerender.io” as you mentioned. The cost depend on the number of page (free under 5000 pages rendered every 7 days for example). For me I am at 20€ a month for my number of pages.
The best alternative is SSR, it’s free and always work, if you manage to put it in place properly no need for such services. Depending on the stack you use some tutorials are enough for you:
For me with meteor/apollo/react I didn’t have the time yet to set up a properly working SSR with fetching data but one day I will to remove prerender.
Be careful that from what I read Google is one of the “clever” crawler and sometimes managed to render properly SPA or non-ssr website, but other crawlers are generally worse than him. So if it’s “sometimes” good in google is probably most of the time bad in others…
Oh yeah, it’s horrible in the others, I was just aiming for Google for now.
I still think it’s hacky but I just remembered that I have a job now so I’ll consider prerender. Though I should note when I checked it, it was 500 free pages, not 5000. And now it seems to be 250.
As a sidenote, I also noticed that Galaxy offers pre-rendering. But when I compare their container to what I currently have, the information to compare the two is lacking and I’m not sure if it’d be a big downgrade.I’d be willing to pay a little more for Galaxy then digitalocean (Especially if it includes prerendering), but I wouldn’t want to if it’s a significant downgrade from what I have.
Slightly off topic but has anyone seen that Google Analytics isn’t properly tracking the time your users spend within your app? It seems they only track time on our landing page (the public area) but not after login.
Take at this solution, there is examples for Google Analytics and Google Tag Manger. Since this library is open source you can grab parts of the code you need, or use it as it is. We are using this solution.
Well My question will be simple. I am using prerender.io right now, what would be the benefits of moving to this one ? If any I’m fully ready for the leap.
Hey @dr.dimitru - I’ve just signed up for ostr.io pre-rendering and successfully setup a Cloudflare Worker to handle requests. When I attempt to pre-render pages, I’m getting 200 status codes along with many 403 codes. I’m certain Cloudflare is blocking some of the requests, either from their own WAF rules or perhaps Bot Fight Mode, so I’m wondering if you have any documentation on how to whitelist the pre-rendering service?
To help you with it please send details of your setup, URL of the website, and page URLs that were successful/failed to pre-render to ostr.io support email.
Team will run tests to ensure you have proper setup.
react-components;
AMP (accelerated mobile pages);