Question on search engine optimization for nodejs website

Question

I just made my first website and I had some questions about how google would index it. For this website, content is only generated once the user interacts with a map seen on the website. I read this article that said Google does not index content that requires interaction. Does this mean my website won't be indexed? Do you have any tips on how I can fix this issue? It has a lot of content that can be shown once a user interacts with it but before any interaction, the website's content is pretty empty. I made this website in nodejs and expressjs with the handlebars template.

Answer 1

It's true that this makes your content not indexable.

The general solution for this is to design a system for deep linking, where someone can share a link to a specific resource on your website (this could even just be a query string), and that resource loads immediately without any user interaction.

For instance, a link like this that opens up your map to a specific piece of content:

http://example.com/map.php?location=1234

Then, the trick is to surface those deep links somewhere so crawlers will stumble upon them. People will naturally surface them by linking in to your site from other sites, but you may want to create something like a "featured locations" page or blog about it to create more deep links for the crawlers.

Another idea: From each location deep link, you could also deep-link nearby locations or related locations, so the crawlers can start to traverse your locations sort of like linked pages.

Some people might suggest just slapping all your deep links into a sitemap and calling it a day, but there are probably issues with that.