I\'ve been looking into ways to improve SEO for angularJS apps that are hosted on a CDN like Amazon S3 (i.e. simple storage with no backend). Most of the solutions out there
if you use ng-cloak in interesting ways there could be a good solution.
I haven't tried this myself, but it should work in theory
The solution is highly dependent on CSS, but it should perfectly well. For example you have three states in your angular app: - index (pathname : #/) - about (pathname : #/about) - contact (pathname : #/contact)
The base case for index can be added in too, but will be tricky so I'll leave it out for now.
Make your HTML look like this:
<body>
<div ng-app="myApp" ng-cloak>
<!-- Your whole angular app goes here... -->
</div>
<div class="static">
<div id="about class="static-other">
<!-- Your whole about content here... -->
</div>
<div id="contact" class="static-other">
<!-- Your whole contact content here... -->
</div>
<div id="index" class="static-main">
<!-- Your whole index content here... -->
</div>
</div>
</body>
(It's Important that you put your index case last, if you want to make it more awesome)
Next Make your CSS look something like this:-
[ng-cloak], .static { display: none; }
[ng-cloak] ~ .static { display: block; }
Just that will probably work well enough for you anyway. The mg-cloak directive will keep your angular app hidden when angular is not loaded and will show your static content instead. Google will get your static content in the HTML. As a bonus end-users can also see well styles static content while angular loads.
You can then get more creative if you start using :target pseudo selectors in your CSS. You can use actual links in your Static content, but just make them links to various ids. So in #index div make sure you have links to #about and #contact. Note the missing '/' in the links. HTML id's can't start with a slash.
Then make your CSS look like this:
[ng-cloak], .static { display: none; }
[ng-cloak] ~ .static { display: block; }
.static-other {display: none;}
.static-other:target {display: block;}
.static-other:target ~ .static-main {display: none;}
You now have a full functioning static app WITH ROUTINg that works before angular starts-up.
As an additional bonus, when angular starts up it is smart enough to convert #about to #/about automatically, and the experience shouldn't even break at all.
Also, not to forget the SEO problem has totally been solved, of course. I've not used this technique yet, as I've always had a server to configure, but I'm very interested in how this works out for you.
Hope this helps.
I've been looking for days to find a solution for this. As far as I know there isn't nice solution to the problem. I hope firebase will eventually enable user-agent redirects. If you have the money you could use MaxCDN enterprise. They offer Edge Rules which includes redirects by user agent .
https://www.maxcdn.com/features/rules/
Here is a full overview of how to make your app SEO-friendly on a storage service such as S3, with nice urls (no #) and everything with grunt with the simple command to be performed after build:
grunt seo
It's still a puzzle of workarounds, but it's working and it's the best you can do. Thank you to @ericluwj and his blogpost who inspired me.
The goal & url structure
The goal is to create 1 html file per state in your angular app. The only major assumption is that you remove the '#' from your url by using html5history (which you should do !) and that all your paths are absolute or using angular states. There are plenty of posts explaining how to do so.
Urls end with a trailing slash like this http://yourdomain.com/page1/
Personally I made sure that http://yourdomain.com/page1 (no trailing slash) also reaches its destination, but that's off topic here. I also made sure that every language has a different state and a different url.
The SEO logic
Our goal is that when someone reaches your website through an http request:
The grunt tasks
Here we go with the grunt tasks:
//grunt plugins you will need:
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-prerender');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-replace');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-wait');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-aws-s3');
//The grunt tasks in the right order
grunt.registerTask('seo', 'First launch server, then prerender and replace', function (target) {
grunt.task.run([
'concurrent:seo' //Step 1: in parrallel launch server, then perform so-called seotasks
]);
});
grunt.registerTask('seotasks', [
'http', //This is an API call to get all pages on my website. Skipping this step in this tutorial.
'wait', // wait 1.5 sec to make sure that server is launched
'prerender', //Step 2: create a snapshot of your website
'replace', //Step 3: clean the mess
'sitemap', //Create a sitemap of your production environment
'aws_s3:dev' //Step 4: upload
]);
We first need to launch a local server (like grunt serve) so that we can take snapshots of our website.
//grunt config
concurrent: {
seo: [
'connect:dist:keepalive', //Launching a server and keeping it alive
'seotasks' //now that we have a running server we can launch the SEO tasks
]
}
The grunt-prerender plugins allows you to take a snapshot of any website using PhantomJS. In our case we want to take a snapshot of all pages of the localhost website we just launched.
//grunt config
prerender: {
options: {
sitePath: 'http://localhost:9001', //points to the url of the server you just launched. You can also make it point to your production website.
//As you can see the source urls allow for multiple languages provided you have different states for different languages (see note below for that)
urls: ['/', '/projects/', '/portal/','/en/', '/projects/en/', '/portal/en/','/fr/', '/projects/fr/', '/portal/fr/'],//this var can be dynamically updated, which is done in my case in the callback of the http task
hashed: true,
dest: 'dist/SEO/',//where your static html files will be stored
timeout:5000,
interval:5000, //taking a snapshot of how the page looks like after 5 seconds.
phantomScript:'basic',
limit:7 //# pages processed simultaneously
}
}
If you open the pre-rendered files, they will work for crawlers, but not for humans. For humans using chrome, your directives will load twice. Therefore you need to redirect intelligent browsers to your home page before angular gets activated (i.e., right after head).
//Add the script tag to redirect if we're not a search bot
replace: {
dist: {
options: {
patterns: [
{
match: '<head>',
//redirect to a clean page if not a bot (to your index.html at the root basically).
replacement: '<head><script>if(!/bot|googlebot|crawler|spider|robot|crawling/i.test(navigator.userAgent)) { document.location = "/#" + window.location.pathname; }</script>'
//note: your hashbang (#) will still work.
}
],
usePrefix: false
},
files: [
{expand: true, flatten: false, src: ['dist/SEO/*/**/*.html'], dest: ''}
]
}
Also make sure you have this code in your index.html on your ui-view element, which clears all the generated html directives BEFORE angular starts.
<div ui-view autoscroll="true" id="ui-view"></div>
<!-- this script is needed to clear ui-view BEFORE angular starts to remove the static html that has been generated for search engines who cannot read angular -->
<script>
if(!/bot|googlebot|crawler|spider|robot|crawling/i.test( navigator.userAgent)) { document.getElementById('ui-view').innerHTML = ""; }
</script>
You first upload your dist folder which contains your build. Then you overwrite it with the files you prerendered and updated.
aws_s3: {
options: {
accessKeyId: "<%= aws.accessKeyId %>", // Use the variables
secretAccessKey: "<%= aws.secret %>", // You can also use env variables
region: 'eu-west-1',
uploadConcurrency: 5, // 5 simultaneous uploads
},
dev: {
options: {
bucket: 'xxxxxxxx'
},
files: [
{expand: true, cwd: 'dist/', src: ['**'], exclude: 'SEO/**', dest: '', differential: true},
{expand: true, cwd: 'dist/SEO/', src: ['**'], dest: '', differential: true},
]
}
}
That's it, you have your solution ! Both humans and bots will be able to read your web-app
Actually this is a task that is indeed very troublesome, but I have managed to get SEO working nicely with my AngularJS SPA site (hosted on AWS S3) at http://www.jobbies.co/. The main idea is to pre-generate and populate the content into the HTML. The templates will still be loaded when the page loads and the pre-rendered content will be replaced.
You can read more about my solution at http://www.ericluwj.com/2015/11/17/seo-for-angularjs-on-s3.html, but do note that there are a lot of conditions.
As AWS is offering Lambda@Edge as a service we can handle this issue without grunt or anything else. (Atleast for basic stuff)
I tried Lambda@Edge and it worked as expected, in my case I just had all the routes set to "/" in Lambda@Edge (Except for the files are present in s3 like css, images etc).
The event for the Lambda that I set to is "viewerRequest" and following is the code.
'use strict';
exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
console.log("Event received is", JSON.stringify(event));
console.log("Context received is", context);
const request = event.Records[0].cf.request;
if (request.uri.endsWith(".rt")) {
console.log("URI is matching with .rt, the URI is ", request.uri);
request.uri = "/";
} else {
console.log("URI is not ending with rt so letting it go URI is", request.uri);
}
console.log("Final request URI is", request.uri);
callback(null, request);
};
Logs in the cloudwatch are little difficult to check as the logs are populated in the region of the cloudwatch which is nearer to the edge location which is handling the request.
For ex. Though this Lambda is deployed/written for us-east I see this in ap-south region as I am accessing the cloudfront from Singapore. Checked it in Google webmaster tools 'Fetch as google' options and the page is being rendered and viewed as expected.