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So I am creating a serverless blog and I am concerned on the indexing issues that may occur based on the configuration. I am pretty familiar with the concept and technicalities of indexing, but I'm worried on the manner in which to make sure crawlers can hit articles.

I want to make a homepage that will go to DynamoDB and access a table telling where the articles are stored (and other metadata) and then creating cards on the home page for each of the articles.

Now the issue (if I understand everything correctly) is that when I create an XML index of the site, Google won't see the links to the articles because they are brought onto the page programmatically. The links are not contained within the "untouched" (the js hasn't populated the page yet) HTML page.

This means that the Spiders will never reach my articles, which is obviously bad if you want your articles to get seen.

My questions consist of:

Is this presumption by me correct? Is there a way around this? I don't want to have to continually update my homepage HTML whenever there is a new article. How do other blogs always keep these links alive? They MUST have to populate their content through functionality, especially for blogs that have been around for a long time and have hundreds or thousands of articles.

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Google executes JavaScript and so should render and index your pages just fine unless you are doing something unusually fancy with your JS.

However, for other search engines that are less sophisticated, you will need to pre-render your content server-side so that it's available in your plain HTML. There's no other way around it.

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  • Even for Google having all the content on one page won't work well. You need to separate your content into enough URLs such that users can land on the content they searched for without too much scrolling. – Stephen Ostermiller♦ Dec 4 '18 at 19:52
  • @StephenOstermiller My understanding is that LindCloud isn't planning to put the entire contents of every article on the index page - only links with previews of each article, like a standard blog listing. – Maximillian Laumeister Dec 4 '18 at 20:04
  • Yes @MaximillianLaumeister my question is in regards to my home page that will link out to the articles. I plan on populating the page with JS that calls a Lambda Function to retrieve the data. I feel like this helps my concerns. Thanks to both! – LindCloud Dec 4 '18 at 21:47

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