My question is regarding URL on my site. I am wondering how to write usable URL for Google search engine while using AJAX on my site.
I'm using AJAX to minimize the resource usage on my site. It also prevent the page from flashing every time you hit a link.
But I also made a Rewrite rule to accept more common URL's. These URL's could be use to get to a document in my site.
Read it here
My URL's are as follow:
<a onClick="MyAjaxFunc()" href ="#">this is my link</a>
Its working great and fast just the way I like it. But what will happen when Google try to index my site?
Is there a way to make my URL work with AJAX on my site but render a more Google friendly URL.
Any ideas?
Thank you.
Related
I have an <img> tag on a series of html pages.
Each href is of the form https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?...
Access to these images by 3rd-parties is blocked (by design) by Google which is fine by me.
In my server log I have a series of errors generated by the Googlebot for each request it makes to this image URLs.
I'd prefer to avoid generating HTML specific to bots so let's put that option to one side.
Are there any non-JS solutions for giving bots a hint not to request these images?
Failing a non-JS solution, is there a JS solution?
Hi I have recently removed the '.html' from the end of my url's to make them look more professional which was brilliant. However, now when I see my site on Google the old url which includes the '.html' still appears which produces people with an error page as expected. How can I tell Google that I have new url addresses so that people can visit my site again?
thanks!
Best way to remove .html extensions is by adding it in .htaccess file. This way search engines will "understand" it, but you will not seeing the search result immediately, since search engine crawler, will take some time to update.
And make sure to submit your url in google. If you have google webmaster you will be able to see this process and status of your website more clearly.
So I am working on a fairly simple project, basically a web page that should list the captions from a certain instagram account. It's all designed, it just needs to be lit up with the content. Have a look at http://evanshellborn.com/speechofthebeets/.
I found that you can see a json file containing all the necessary data at instagram.com/{username}/media. So in my case, https://www.instagram.com/beets_are_life/media/. So before I put that page actually online, I was on my local machine, and I did a JSON call to that page and it worked perfectly. So I built it all out and my web page loaded the captions just like I wanted it to.
Then I went to put it online, (http://evanshellborn.com/speechofthebeets), but it doesn't work. Have a look at the script at the bottom of it, on my localhost that code works and the captions get loaded. But on the live page, I get an access not allowed error in the console. So I think Instagram doesn't allow this sort of direct access anymore, you have to go through their API.
Now I've tried looking at the API but it seems rather confusing. Basically what I'm asking for is a different JSON url that would give me the same result as https://www.instagram.com/beets_are_life/media/, but that would work from the live page.
I think https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/{user-id}/?access_token=ACCESS-TOKEN would work, just replacing {user-id} with the appropraite user_id. But where do I get an access token?
From reading https://www.instagram.com/developer/authentication/, it looks like you get one when a user puts in their user credentials. But I don't want to have anyone log in, I just want a simple web page.
Hopefully that made sense. How can I do what I want?
Looks like the API url https://www.instagram.com/beets_are_life/media/ does not support jsonp (no callback support), so u cannot use javascript (client side) for making API request, it will fail because of Access-Control-Allow-Origin error on browser side, you have make this API call on server side as proxy.
I guess https://www.instagram.com/<USER_NAME>/media/ is not a publicly documented API, thats the reason it is not supporting jsonp, Instagram uses it for their website and since it is same-origin it will work for them on client-side
This link will help you embeding the instagram on a simple html webpage.
There is a button on the bottom of the post on instagram.when you click on the link a menu pops up. then click on embed
now a box pops up
just copy paste the html and you are done.
it will fetch the post for you
I've just noticed that the long, convoluted Facebook URLs that we're used to now look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/example.profile#!/pages/Another-Page/123456789012345
As far as I can recall, earlier this year it was just a normal URL-fragment-like string (starting with #), without the exclamation mark. But now it's a shebang or hashbang (#!), which I've previously only seen in shell scripts and Perl scripts.
The new Twitter URLs now also feature the #! symbols. A Twitter profile URL, for example, now looks like this:
http://twitter.com/#!/BoltClock
Does #! now play some special role in URLs, like for a certain Ajax framework or something since the new Facebook and Twitter interfaces are now largely Ajaxified?
Would using this in my URLs benefit my Web application in any way?
This technique is now deprecated.
This used to tell Google how to index the page.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
This technique has mostly been supplanted by the ability to use the JavaScript History API that was introduced alongside HTML5. For a URL like www.example.com/ajax.html#!key=value, Google will check the URL www.example.com/ajax.html?_escaped_fragment_=key=value to fetch a non-AJAX version of the contents.
The octothorpe/number-sign/hashmark has a special significance in an URL, it normally identifies the name of a section of a document. The precise term is that the text following the hash is the anchor portion of an URL. If you use Wikipedia, you will see that most pages have a table of contents and you can jump to sections within the document with an anchor, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing identifies the page and Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test is the anchor. The reason that Facebook and other Javascript-driven applications (like my own Wood & Stones) use anchors is that they want to make pages bookmarkable (as suggested by a comment on that answer) or support the back button without reloading the entire page from the server.
In order to support bookmarking and the back button, you need to change the URL. However, if you change the page portion (with something like window.location = 'http://raganwald.com';) to a different URL or without specifying an anchor, the browser will load the entire page from the URL. Try this in Firebug or Safari's Javascript console. Load http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald. Now in the Javascript console, type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald';
You will see the page refresh from the server. Now type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#try_this';
Aha! No page refresh! Type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#and_this';
Still no refresh. Use the back button to see that these URLs are in the browser history. The browser notices that we are on the same page but just changing the anchor, so it doesn't reload. Thanks to this behaviour, we can have a single Javascript application that appears to the browser to be on one 'page' but to have many bookmarkable sections that respect the back button. The application must change the anchor when a user enters different 'states', and likewise if a user uses the back button or a bookmark or a link to load the application with an anchor included, the application must restore the appropriate state.
So there you have it: Anchors provide Javascript programmers with a mechanism for making bookmarkable, indexable, and back-button-friendly applications. This technique has a name: It is a Single Page Interface.
p.s. There is a fourth benefit to this technique: Loading page content through AJAX and then injecting it into the current DOM can be much faster than loading a new page. In addition to the speed increase, further tricks like loading certain portions in the background can be performed under the programmer's control.
p.p.s. Given all of that, the 'bang' or exclamation mark is a further hint to Google's web crawler that the exact same page can be loaded from the server at a slightly different URL. See Ajax Crawling. Another technique is to make each link point to a server-accessible URL and then use unobtrusive Javascript to change it into an SPI with an anchor.
Here's the key link again: The Single Page Interface Manifesto
First of all: I'm the author of the The Single Page Interface Manifesto cited by raganwald
As raganwald has explained very well, the most important aspect of the Single Page Interface (SPI) approach used in FaceBook and Twitter is the use of hash # in URLs
The character ! is added only for Google purposes, this notation is a Google "standard" for crawling web sites intensive on AJAX (in the extreme Single Page Interface web sites). When Google's crawler finds an URL with #! it knows that an alternative conventional URL exists providing the same page "state" but in this case on load time.
In spite of #! combination is very interesting for SEO, is only supported by Google (as far I know), with some JavaScript tricks you can build SPI web sites SEO compatible for any web crawler (Yahoo, Bing...).
The SPI Manifesto and demos do not use Google's format of ! in hashes, this notation could be easily added and SPI crawling could be even easier (UPDATE: now ! notation is used and remains compatible with other search engines).
Take a look to this tutorial, is an example of a simple ItsNat SPI site but you can pick some ideas for other frameworks, this example is SEO compatible for any web crawler.
The hard problem is to generate any (or selected) "AJAX page state" as plain HTML for SEO, in ItsNat is very easy and automatic, the same site is in the same time SPI or page based for SEO (or when JavaScript is disabled for accessibility). With other web frameworks you can ever follow the double site approach, one site is SPI based and another page based for SEO, for instance Twitter uses this "double site" technique.
I would be very careful if you are considering adopting this hashbang convention.
Once you hashbang, you can’t go back. This is probably the stickiest issue. Ben’s post put forward the point that when pushState is more widely adopted then we can leave hashbangs behind and return to traditional URLs. Well, fact is, you can’t. Earlier I stated that URLs are forever, they get indexed and archived and generally kept around. To add to that, cool URLs don’t change. We don’t want to disconnect ourselves from all the valuable links to our content. If you’ve implemented hashbang URLs at any point then want to change them without breaking links the only way you can do it is by running some JavaScript on the root document of your domain. Forever. It’s in no way temporary, you are stuck with it.
You really want to use pushState instead of hashbangs, because making your URLs ugly and possibly broken -- forever -- is a colossal and permanent downside to hashbangs.
To have a good follow-up about all this, Twitter - one of the pioneers of hashbang URL's and single-page-interface - admitted that the hashbang system was slow in the long run and that they have actually started reversing the decision and returning to old-school links.
Article about this is here.
I always assumed the ! just indicated that the hash fragment that followed corresponded to a URL, with ! taking the place of the site root or domain. It could be anything, in theory, but it seems the Google AJAX Crawling API likes it this way.
The hash, of course, just indicates that no real page reload is occurring, so yes, it’s for AJAX purposes. Edit: Raganwald does a lovely job explaining this in more detail.
We have an AngularJS site using HTML5 routes. I just did some test "Fetch as Google" runs. The results are a bit confusing:
On the fetching tab, I see our site as it looks on view source, with all the front end bindings {{ }}, and not all the HTML rendered
On the rendering tab, our site looks perfectly fine, no {{ }} variables, it seems like Google bot fetched and rendered the site fine, which is maybe in line with this, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ae/2014/05/rendering-pages-with-fetch-as-google.html.
However, we are already prepared for Google to not be able to crawl our site, so we have already added , so the Google bot revisits our page with “?_escaped_fragment_=". We followed this, https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started (section "3. Handle pages without hash fragments"). In our Nginx config we have something like this:
if ($args ~ "_escaped_fragment_=") {
serve the static HTML snapshots
}
, and indeed it works fine, if we pass the _escaped_fragment_= ourselves. However, the Google bot never tried to crawl our site with this param, so it never crawled the snapshot. Are we missing something? Should we also add agent detection for Google bot on our Nginx conf? Something like this?
if ($http_user_agent ~* "googlebot|yahoo|bingbot|baiduspider|yandex|yeti|yodaobot|gigabot|ia_archiver|facebookexternalhit|twitterbot|developers\.google\.com") {
server from snapshots
}
It would be great if we can understand this better, thank you so much in advance!
UPDATE:
I just read this, http://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript/angularjs-seo-with-prerender-io?_escaped_fragment_=tag#caveats. So, it seems that when using the manual tools (Fetch as Google), we should pass ourselves either #! or ?_escaped_fragment_= in the right place. Indeed, if I pass ?_escaped_fragment_= in our case, I do see the HTML snapshot that we have created.
Is that true? Is this how it works indeed?
UPDATE 2
On the bottom of this thread, a Google employee verifies that for Google Webmasters "Fetch as Google", you need to manually pass the _escaped_fragment_= param yourself, https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/fZjdyjq0n98/PZ-nlq_2RjcJ
Cheers,
Iraklis
I will try to answer your questions based on our experiences in the last month of developing a SPA with HTML5 mode.
How do I get Googlebot to use ?_escaped_fragment_= instead of the direct links.
This is actually quite simple but easy to overlook. In fact, there are two different ways to get Googlebot to try the escaped_fragment. The first method is to run your site in non-html5 mode. This means that your URLs will be of the form:
http://my.domain.com/base/#!some/path/on/website
Googlebot recognizes the #! and makes a second call to your server with an altered URL:
http://my.domain.com/base/?_escaped_fragment_=some/path/on/website
Which you can then handle as you wish. The second way to get Googlebot to try _escaped_fragment_ mode is to include the following meta tag on the index page you supply to the bot:
<meta name="fragment" content="!">
This will make googlebot check the other version of the webpage every time it sees the tag. Interestingly you can use both these techniques together or you can do what we ended up doing, which is running in html5 mode with the meta tag. This means that your URLs will be escaped as follows:
http://my.domain.com/base/some/path/on/website?_escaped_fragment_=
Interestingly, the bot will not put anything at the end of the fragment. But depending on what webserver you are running, you can easily map this with a pattern matching the "_escaped_fragment_" text to your alternate bot page. For more information on the escaped fragment go here.
"Fetch as Googlebot" returns two different versions of my page, the source with {{}} and the rendered page looking correct. What does that mean?
Google's Bots can actually interpret JavaScript to a limited extent since early 2014. For more information, read the official blog entry on google webmasters here. However, as is made clear in the blog entry, this comes with a lot of caveats. For instance:
Googlebot does not guarantee to execute all javascript code.
Googlebot will attempt to find links in the javascript to follow and use them to help find more pages.
Googlebot will render the preview in webmasters tools by executing as much of the javascript as it can (thus the lack of {{}} in the rendered version).
Googlebot will not necessarily use the rendered version in order to build the meta information about your site for its index.
As of 18/12/2014, we are still unsure if Googlebot can actually extract any information from an SPA in rendered mode for its index beyond finding links to follow in the javascript. In our experience, Googlebot will include {{}} in its index listing so that when you try to use {{}} to fill meta information (description, keywords, title, etc...) your site looks like this in Google Search results:
{{meta.siteTitle}}
http://my.domain.com/base/some/path/on/website
{{meta.description}}
rather than what you expect which might look like this:
Domain
http://my.domain.com/base/some/path/on/website
This is a random page on my domain. An excellent example page to be sure!
GoogleBot for Search Engine uses _escaped_fragment_ but we can not be sure for other services
Google recommend to serve an HTML snapshot of AJAX website by using hashbang (#!) and _escaped_fragment_ param.
But as often for new Google feature all Google services do not support it from the begging.
For now, by experience, we are sure GoogleBot for indexing webpage use HTML snapshot and _escaped_fragment_. You can check your Server Access Logs to be sure Google did it on your application.
(For now and by experience, nothing official by Google) other services like PageSpeed Insight, Webmaster Tools parser, Richsnippet testing tools, etc.: hasbang (#!) is not supported. You have to use _escaped_fragment_.
Should you use User Agent detection to serve HTML snapshot?
No. Just don't. For different reasons :
You just do not know which services/bots on the web would like to parse your content and you can not be exhaustive (for instance, think of all the social networks existing on the web using Bot to create a snippet of your content : you can not handle them one by one)
This can be considered as cloacking : serving a different version depending on type of user on the same URL, which is basically wrong for SEO.
Google looks for #! in our site urls and then takes everything after the #! and adds it in _escaped_fragment_ query parameter. Some developers create basic html pages with real data and serve these pages from server side at the time of crawling. So , why not we render same pages with PhantomJS on serve side which has _escaped_fragment_.
For more detail please read this blog .
Maybe a bit outdated, but for the completeness:
According to the statement from May 23, 2014 Google bot is now able to "see your content more like modern Web browsers".
According to their statement from October 14, 2015 Google deprecated the AJAX crawling scheme.
So using the HTML5 History API (html5mode in angular) should be no problem to Google.