I've seen a few references to Google now crawling JS sites on this forum but nothing definitive. Nor have I seen any updates to the recommendations from Google. We can vouch for this. It's happening. The question is what does it mean? Is it time to get off the snapshots train?
Background: We have used Ember.js to generate our HTML for over a year. We create snapshots of our pages (pre-render) and serve them to Google using "_escaped_fragment_=" best practices. Sadly, our SEO has been rather poor.
I've been digging into this recently and discovered that Google is indexing the live, JS version of our pages (even though we have been pointing it at our snapshots). So, should we stop pointing Google at our snapshots and rely on their crawling?
Case: The "Donald Trump" page on Countable
Here's the current version of the Donald Trump Page on Countable - this is the version that Google is fetching properly (above) and has indexed:
Here's the outdated cached-snapshotted version of the Donald Trump page on Countable (note the numerous differences):
Search for the rich snippet from the current version of the page - "Donald Trump is a Republican candidate for President and business magnate, investor, and television personality"
Fetch As Google correctly Renders the current version of the Donald Trump page on Countable
Unfortunately, and this is really lame, the "fetching" tab shows our "noscript" HTML which is absolutely not what Google is fetching, rendering or indexing:
So, as a recap, do we ignore Google's advice (and the evidence of the Fetched HTML tab) in favor of the empirical evidence that Google is, in fact, successfully rendering our live JS?
Thanks in advance for your help.