I heard if you serve different content with Javascript disabled, search Bots can penalize you. I have been looking at the source of the new Hulu website and wanted to ask a few questions. I was told to ask them here as opposed to StackOverflow. Your help will be much appreciated.
I am building a Backbone application, and the site is very Javascript heavy as you can imagine. I did not code the site with progressive enhancement in mind. I thought if Hulu can successfully do this, I am sure it is feasible.
With every page, Hulu has a content area (div id = "SEO") with links to its various videos. This SEO content area is removed with javascript. Obviously this will only be removed if Javascript is not disabled. If it is dsiabled, a no script tag is used covering the SEO content area asking the user to enable Javascript. So in essence, the Bot will still crawl the SEO content area.
99% of the content, from what I can see, is being served via JSON. Now the Bot obviously cannot read this content. However, all SEO Meta tags are served from the server with the content inside the SEO content area.
Now my question is: is this enough? Can I have a content area with just "enough seo" (H1 paragraph etc) so the Bots can get an understanding of what the page contains, then have my application takeover? Will I get penalized for serving different content?
I can have the page rendered on the server, but it does require much more work and I will then need to maintain both client and server side templates.