AngularJS, Google Search and SEO

Our new site sorted.jobs is now in a stealthy, pre-launch mode, so it is time to start thinking about getting it into the various search engines -especially the big one.

AJAX

Our Job Posts are normally served as AngularJS views -which Google can't parse, since they are AJAX based (although interestingly it can render them with Google Fetch) . However, Google can be persuaded to fetch another version of the page and index that by including this meta tag in the head :

<meta name="fragment" content="!">

If the crawler sees this tag it will then resend the original request with ?_escaped_fragment_= tacked on the end (more here : https://prerender.io/js-seo/angularjs-seo-get-your-site-indexed-and-to-the-top-of-the-search-results/)

so
http://www.sorted.jobs/job_post/UX+Developer/ULKYpZTSSRqBGvGirp_yOQ 
would become
http://www.sorted.jobs/job_post/UX+Developer/ULKYpZTSSRqBGvGirp_yOQ?_escaped_fragment_=

on the server side in the handler I recognise the second form and render a page that is HTML only.

SEO

Since the user doesn't see this page  it doesn't need the full functionality of the original  and we also have the chance to tweak the page to do things like providing a more meaningful <title> and a <meta name=description> tag which Google can do things with as per this snippet post

 Testing and Webmaster Tools

One minor 'gotcha' that we found was with Webmaster tools, in as much as the stats aren't up to date -according to tools we have 0 pages indexed wheres a site specific google search (site:sorted.jobs) shows us  the ten pages we expect.

A second issue is that the 'Fetch' functionality within Webmaster Tools doesn't fire off the second request automatically -so you can't see the page Google would actually index from sorted.jobs on the Fetch results page, just the originally requested AngularJS page.

On the plus side if you 'Fetch' the page you can check that the <meta name="fragment" content="!"> is in the content, and if it is you can then 'Submit to Index' which will kick off Google's crawler on your page and put it into their index within minutes.