3

Is it possible to flag my website as a SPA?

The reason I want to do this is because on Google Search Console I see my links indexed without canonical links, but if I try for a live version the crawler sees my canonical links. The only conclusion I come to is that Google is using different crawlers and one can read SPAs while the other can't. Does that make sense?

Is there any way I can tell Google to always use a crawler able to render SPAs, so that I make sure it indexes my links right (with canonical links)?

1 Answer 1

4

Google does use two versions of Googlebot. One that just fetches the page and looks at the source code. The second that renders the page.

Google will automatically use both versions of the crawler on your site. There is no way for you to flag your site in Google Search Console as requiring rendering.

The normal Googlebot crawler without rendering requires far fewer resources for Google to run. They run that crawler first and far more often. The rendering version runs later and less frequently.

That means that any page that requires rendering to index properly is always going to be delayed. Indexing and updates will both be slower. At one point Google said that the render queue was 2 months behind the normal crawl queue.

If you want to have good SEO you should not use SPA technology such as React and Angular for your website. While you can now get search engines to index them somewhat, they are still no where near as good as non-JavaScript HTML websites for search engines.

Update November 2019: Google says that their render queue is now much faster. On average the render happens 5 seconds after the crawl. In the 90th percentile case it happens minutes after the crawl. That should mean that AJAX powered sites are no longer at a disadvantage from the render queue delay.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.