Ask HN: Web app architecture

3 points by srkiranraj 13 years ago | 3 comments

I am developing a review/recommendation web app (like imdb/zomato). How should my app architecture should be so that it is highly search engine friendly. Until now I have been using "Single Page Architecture". In order to maintain history we add # in URL's. A sample URL looks like domainname/#/category/value (And contents of this page is mostly generated using javascript). Due to hashes search engines don't index it. Whenever a user searches for a keyword in the above URL, how do I get this page to be displayed in search result as well.

Any tips or words of wisdom for making my app SEO friendly.

xackpot 13 years ago |

Using #! (hashbangs) in not advisable as you will be presenting different pages to the users and the web crawler for the same URL. If you can make sure that you present the same content to the users and the crawler then you should be fine.

Anyways, the preferred method for such single page seo friendly URLS is to have hashbang in them. E.g. domainname/#!/category/value. When the search engine crawls to this page it will crawl to domainname/?_escaped_fragment_=/category/value. So for the crawler you will have to write search engine friendly page with all the info that you want it to index. But also make sure that the same info is presented to the users. The UI could be different in both the cases but the content should be same. When the search engine indexes these pages, it will present the url in #! formats in the search results. For more details check out the link that mileschet has provided.

mileschet 13 years ago |

Hi, i´ve been doing some research on it too, i strongly recommend you to visit https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/... it gives me some direction.

dotborg 13 years ago |

use window.pushstate instead of urls with hashes,

you can change URL in window address without reloading entier page

Google will index "hashbangs", but they will rank poorly and you will get only small amount of traffic from search