I want to add <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com" hreflang="en-us" /> this kinda of link tag in my bigcommerce site using jQuery or anything else...
Tried code:
1:
if ($("body#home").length > 0) {
$('head').add($('<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com" hreflang="en-us" />'));
}
2:
var page = window.location.pathname;
if (page == '/' || page == '/index.html') {
$('head').add($('<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com" hreflang="en-us" />'));
}
3:
if ($("html").hasClass("home")) {
$("head").append("<link rel=alternate href=https://www.example.com hreflang=en-us>");
}
But nothing worked for me....
Let's first give some background on hreflang and the three valid ways that Google will read it..
HTML link element in header. In the HTML section of http://www.example.com/, add a link element pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage at http://es.example.com/, like this:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />
HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:
Link: <http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"
To specify multiple hreflang values in a Link HTTP header, separate the values with commas like so:
Link: <http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es",<http://de.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="de"
Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.
Source: Google 'hreflang' Usage
So Method 2 isn't possible since you can't modify or control the headers from your BigCommerce store.
This leaves us with Method 1 or Method 3.
The big question here though is..
"Will Google index & process a dynamically inserted JavaScript hreflang link tag"?
Unfortunately at the time of writing this, I need to wait several days for the Google Webmaster Tool to become active on my test site so I can be certain; while all the 3rd party hreflang test sites I used failed. My gut feeling is that I would not trust it. However, if you have an active Google Webmaster / Search Console account, you can test this by going to: Dashboard > Search Traffic > International Targeting.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it will work, and so to answer your specific question, you would go about this method like so...
Within the <head>...</head> block, create an empty link tag like so: <link id="lang1" /> This will have the link element physically in the DOM awaiting its attributes to be dynamically added.
Next, immediately below the link element created above, let's create the JavaScript that will turn this empty link tag into a complete hreflang reference depending on the current page:
<script>
// If current page is homepage, then append the neccessary attributes to the link tag. Else, do nothing.
// If on homepage, the link tag would become: "<link id="lang1" rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com" hreflang="en-us" />"
window.location.pathname == '/' ? $("#lang1").attr({"rel": "alternate", "href": "https://www.example.com", "hreflang": "en-us"}) : false;
</script>
And that's about it from the coding side. If you run this and inspect the DOM (it won't be viewable in page source), you can confirm that your link tag now reads as: <link id="lang1" rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com" hreflang="en-us" />
Again, whether or not Google will process this, I don't know.
But here's an alternative I do know will work...
We can follow Method 3 listed above, and submit language version information via your site's sitemap, which can specify which individual and specific pages have alternative language versions.
Now, you do not have access to directly modify your BigCommerce generated Sitemap. But what you do have access to, is to:
Create your own custom sitemap file, and upload it to your store.
Tell Google to use the URL of this custom sitemap, rather than the default BigCommerce one.
There are plenty of resources online on how to create a sitemap, and there are many tools that can help automate this process. Although beware, if you use a custom sitemap, then you will need to maintain it and manually update it whenever you add new pages or products to your store.
I've taken the time to point you to some specific documentation resources that should help you with this task. I will eventually come back to this post to transcribe the content from these links into this post as I do recognize posting links is bad SO practice. A hardass might say "well why are you doing it then", and well my time is limited and I'm trying to be as helpful as I can now upfront.
Here is a link from the Google Docs with information on creating a sitemap with page specific language versions.
Here is a link from the BigCommerce Docs with information on uploading a custom file to your store which can then be accessible via your domain/URL.
Finally, here is a link from the BigCommerce Docs with information on how to direct Google to use a specific/alternate file as your store's sitemap.
Please attempt the code suggestion I wrote for Method #1 and test it using your Google Webmaster's tool to let us know if the hreflang link tag is successfully crawled by Google when dynamically inserted via JavaScript - you would be doing the community a great service as there is no definite answer around this.
Remember, you can officially test this by logging into your Google Webmaster Console and navigating to Dashboard > Search Traffic > International Targeting
I've got a product that embeds into websites similarly to Paypal (customers add my button to their website, users click on this button and once the service is complete I redirect them back to the original website).
I'd like to demo my technology to customers without actually modifying their live website. To that end, is it possible to configure http://stackoverflow.myserver.com/ so it mirrors http://www.stackoverflow.com/ while seamlessly injecting my button?
Meaning, I want to demo the experience of using my button on the live website without actually re-hosting the customer's database on my server.
I know there are security concerns here, so feel free to mention them so long as we meet the requirements. I do not need to demo this for website that uses HTTPS.
More specifically, I would like to demonstrate the idea of financial bounties on Stackoverflow questions by injecting a Paypal button into the page. How would I demo this off http://stackoverflow.myserver.com/ without modifying https://stackoverflow.com/?
REQUEST TO REOPEN: I have reworded the question to be more specific per your request. If you still believe it is too broad, please help me understand your reasoning by posting a comment below.
UPDATE: I posted a follow-up challenge at How to rewrite URLs referenced by Javascript code?
UPDATE2: I discarded the idea of bookmarklets and Greasemonkey because they require customer-side installation/modification. We need to make the process as seamless as possible, otherwise many of get turned off by the process and won't let us pitch.
I would suggest to create a proxy using a HTTP handler.
In the ProcessRequest you can do a HttpWebRequest to get the content on the other side, alter it and return the adjusted html to the browser. You can rewrite the urls inside to allow the loading of images, etc from the original source.
public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
{
// get the content using HttpWebRequest
string html = ...
// alter it
// write back the adjusted html
context.Response.Write(html);
}
If you're demoing on the client-side and looking to just hack it in quickly, you could pull it off with some jQuery. I slapped the button after the SO logo just for a demo. You could type this into your console:
$('head').append('<script src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/js/external/dg.js" type="text/javascript"></script>')
$('#hlogo').append('<form action="https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/webapps/adaptivepayment/flow/pay" target="PPDGFrame" class="standard"><label for="buy">Buy Now:</label><input type="image" id="submitBtn" value="Pay with PayPal" src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_paynowCC_LG.gif"><input id="type" type="hidden" name="expType" value="light"><input id="paykey" type="hidden" name="paykey" value="insert_pay_key">')
var embeddedPPFlow = new PAYPAL.apps.DGFlow({trigger: 'submitBtn'});
Now, I'm not sure if I did something wrong or not because I got this error on the last part:
Expected 'none' or URL but found 'alpha('. Error in parsing value for 'filter'. Declaration dropped.
But at any rate if you are demoing you could just do this, maybe as a plan B. (You could also write a userscript for this so you don't have to open the console, I guess?)
After playing with this for a very long time I ended up doing the following:
Rewrite the HTML and JS files on the fly. All other resources are hosted by the original website.
For HTML files, inject a <base> tag, pointing to the website being redirected. This will cause the browser to automatically redirect relative links (in the HTML file, CSS files, and even Flash!) to the original website.
For the JS files, apply a regular expression to patch specific sections of code that point to the wrote URL. I load up the redirected page in a browser, look for broken links, and figure out which section of JS needs to be patched to correct the problem.
This sounds a lot harder than it actually is. On average, patching each page takes less than 5 minutes of work.
The big discovery was the <base> tag! It corrected the vast majority of links on my behalf.
Is it possible to use FB share plugin without APP ID?
If I use HTML5 code then the console logs an error FB.getLoginStatus() called before calling FB.init().
To use HTML 5 FB like is it necessary to have an APP ID?
Thank you
Here i am sharing what i did to share post on fb wall, In this way you do not need to use appId. Just put this code in your HTML page where you want link to share...
<a name="fb_share" type="button" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u={$url}&media={$imgPath}&description={$desc}" class="joinFB">Share Your Advertise</a>
URL parameters are as explained below,
u : url or link you want to user to go when he clicks on your wall post,
media : full image path,make sure that image is available on given path,it will accept one image only
description : a short description that you want to show on wall
It will also ask you to write some data which will be displayed above your post. Description passed in url will be displayed in right side of your image.
Please note that i had passed $url,$desc,$imgPath variables as per my need. The above code is in smarty-php, so change it as per your requirement.
Hope this becomes helpful to you.
Yes you need an app id. You can try to inject your own code into the DOM of the user when using facebook and call functions in their javascript... But I doubt many users will actiually use an "app" that works this way.
I see two issues with AngularJS application regarding search engines and SEO:
1) What happens with custom tags? Do search engines ignore the whole content within those tags? i.e. suppose I have
<custom>
<h1>Hey, this title is important</h1>
</custom>
would <h1> be indexed despite being inside custom tags?
2) Is there a way to avoid search engines of indexing {{}} binds literally? i.e.
<h2>{{title}}</h2>
I know I could do something like
<h2 ng-bind="title"></h2>
but what if I want to actually let the crawler "see" the title? Is server-side rendering the only solution?
(2022) Use Server Side Rendering if possible, and generate URLs with Pushstate
Google can and will run JavaScript now so it is very possible to build a site using only JavaScript provided you create a sensible URL structure. However, pagespeed has become a progressively more important ranking factor and typically pages built clientside perform poorly on initial render.
Serverside rendering (SSR) can help by allowing your pages to be pre-generated on the server. Your html containst the div that will be used as the page root, but this is not an empty div, it contains the html that the JavaScript would have generated if it were allowed to run.
The client downloads the HTML and renders it giving a very fast initial load, then it executes the JavaScript replacing the content of the root div with generated content in a process known as hydration.
Many newer frameworks come with SSR built in, notably NextJS.
(2015) Use PushState and Precomposition
The current (2015) way to do this is using the JavaScript pushState method.
PushState changes the URL in the top browser bar without reloading the page. Say you have a page containing tabs. The tabs hide and show content, and the content is inserted dynamically, either using AJAX or by simply setting display:none and display:block to hide and show the correct tab content.
When the tabs are clicked, use pushState to update the URL in the address bar. When the page is rendered, use the value in the address bar to determine which tab to show. Angular routing will do this for you automatically.
Precomposition
There are two ways to hit a PushState Single Page App (SPA)
Via PushState, where the user clicks a PushState link and the content is AJAXed in.
By hitting the URL directly.
The initial hit on the site will involve hitting the URL directly. Subsequent hits will simply AJAX in content as the PushState updates the URL.
Crawlers harvest links from a page then add them to a queue for later processing. This means that for a crawler, every hit on the server is a direct hit, they don't navigate via Pushstate.
Precomposition bundles the initial payload into the first response from the server, possibly as a JSON object. This allows the Search Engine to render the page without executing the AJAX call.
There is some evidence to suggest that Google might not execute AJAX requests. More on this here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160318211223/http://www.analog-ni.co/precomposing-a-spa-may-become-the-holy-grail-to-seo
Search Engines can read and execute JavaScript
Google has been able to parse JavaScript for some time now, it's why they originally developed Chrome, to act as a full featured headless browser for the Google spider. If a link has a valid href attribute, the new URL can be indexed. There's nothing more to do.
If clicking a link in addition triggers a pushState call, the site can be navigated by the user via PushState.
Search Engine Support for PushState URLs
PushState is currently supported by Google and Bing.
Google
Here's Matt Cutts responding to Paul Irish's question about PushState for SEO:
http://youtu.be/yiAF9VdvRPw
Here is Google announcing full JavaScript support for the spider:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html
The upshot is that Google supports PushState and will index PushState URLs.
See also Google webmaster tools' fetch as Googlebot. You will see your JavaScript (including Angular) is executed.
Bing
Here is Bing's announcement of support for pretty PushState URLs dated March 2013:
http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2013/03/21/search-engine-optimization-best-practices-for-ajax-urls/
Don't use HashBangs #!
Hashbang URLs were an ugly stopgap requiring the developer to provide a pre-rendered version of the site at a special location. They still work, but you don't need to use them.
Hashbang URLs look like this:
domain.example/#!path/to/resource
This would be paired with a metatag like this:
<meta name="fragment" content="!">
Google will not index them in this form, but will instead pull a static version of the site from the escaped_fragments URL and index that.
Pushstate URLs look like any ordinary URL:
domain.example/path/to/resource
The difference is that Angular handles them for you by intercepting the change to document.location dealing with it in JavaScript.
If you want to use PushState URLs (and you probably do) take out all the old hash style URLs and metatags and simply enable HTML5 mode in your config block.
Testing your site
Google Webmaster tools now contains a tool which will allow you to fetch a URL as Google, and render JavaScript as Google renders it.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch
Generating PushState URLs in Angular
To generate real URLs in Angular, rather than # prefixed ones, set HTML5 mode on your $locationProvider object.
$locationProvider.html5Mode(true);
Server Side
Since you are using real URLs, you will need to ensure the same template (plus some precomposed content) gets shipped by your server for all valid URLs. How you do this will vary depending on your server architecture.
Sitemap
Your app may use unusual forms of navigation, for example hover or scroll. To ensure Google is able to drive your app, I would probably suggest creating a sitemap, a simple list of all the URLs your app responds to. You can place this at the default location (/sitemap or /sitemap.xml), or tell Google about it using webmaster tools.
It's a good idea to have a sitemap anyway.
Browser support
Pushstate works in IE10. In older browsers, Angular will automatically fall back to hash style URLs
A demo page
The following content is rendered using a pushstate URL with precomposition:
http://html5.gingerhost.com/london
As can be verified, at this link, the content is indexed and is appearing in Google.
Serving 404 and 301 Header status codes
Because the search engine will always hit your server for every request, you can serve header status codes from your server and expect Google to see them.
Update May 2014
Google crawlers now executes javascript - you can use the Google Webmaster Tools to better understand how your sites are rendered by Google.
Original answer
If you want to optimize your app for search engines there is unfortunately no way around serving a pre-rendered version to the crawler. You can read more about Google's recommendations for ajax and javascript-heavy sites here.
If this is an option I'd recommend reading this article about how to do SEO for Angular with server-side rendering.
I’m not sure what the crawler does when it encounters custom tags.
Let's get definitive about AngularJS and SEO
Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines crawl the web in traditional ways using traditional crawlers. They run robots that crawl the HTML on web pages, collecting information along the way. They keep interesting words and look for other links to other pages (these links, the amount of them and the number of them come into play with SEO).
So why don't search engines deal with javascript sites?
The answer has to do with the fact that the search engine robots work through headless browsers and they most often do not have a javascript rendering engine to render the javascript of a page. This works for most pages as most static pages don't care about JavaScript rendering their page, as their content is already available.
What can be done about it?
Luckily, crawlers of the larger sites have started to implement a mechanism that allows us to make our JavaScript sites crawlable, but it requires us to implement a change to our site.
If we change our hashPrefix to be #! instead of simply #, then modern search engines will change the request to use _escaped_fragment_ instead of #!. (With HTML5 mode, i.e. where we have links without the hash prefix, we can implement this same feature by looking at the User Agent header in our backend).
That is to say, instead of a request from a normal browser that looks like:
http://www.ng-newsletter.com/#!/signup/page
A search engine will search the page with:
http://www.ng-newsletter.com/?_escaped_fragment_=/signup/page
We can set the hash prefix of our Angular apps using a built-in method from ngRoute:
angular.module('myApp', [])
.config(['$location', function($location) {
$location.hashPrefix('!');
}]);
And, if we're using html5Mode, we will need to implement this using the meta tag:
<meta name="fragment" content="!">
Reminder, we can set the html5Mode() with the $location service:
angular.module('myApp', [])
.config(['$location',
function($location) {
$location.html5Mode(true);
}]);
Handling the search engine
We have a lot of opportunities to determine how we'll deal with actually delivering content to search engines as static HTML. We can host a backend ourselves, we can use a service to host a back-end for us, we can use a proxy to deliver the content, etc. Let's look at a few options:
Self-hosted
We can write a service to handle dealing with crawling our own site using a headless browser, like phantomjs or zombiejs, taking a snapshot of the page with rendered data and storing it as HTML. Whenever we see the query string ?_escaped_fragment_ in a search request, we can deliver the static HTML snapshot we took of the page instead of the pre-rendered page through only JS. This requires us to have a backend that delivers our pages with conditional logic in the middle. We can use something like prerender.io's backend as a starting point to run this ourselves. Of course, we still need to handle the proxying and the snippet handling, but it's a good start.
With a paid service
The easiest and the fastest way to get content into search engine is to use a service Brombone, seo.js, seo4ajax, and prerender.io are good examples of these that will host the above content rendering for you. This is a good option for the times when we don't want to deal with running a server/proxy. Also, it's usually super quick.
For more information about Angular and SEO, we wrote an extensive tutorial on it at http://www.ng-newsletter.com/posts/serious-angular-seo.html and we detailed it even more in our book ng-book: The Complete Book on AngularJS. Check it out at ng-book.com.
You should really check out the tutorial on building an SEO-friendly AngularJS site on the year of moo blog. He walks you through all the steps outlined on Angular's documentation. http://www.yearofmoo.com/2012/11/angularjs-and-seo.html
Using this technique, the search engine sees the expanded HTML instead of the custom tags.
This has drastically changed.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-offers-recommendations-for-seo-friendly-ajax-suggests-html5-pushstate-152946
If you use:
$locationProvider.html5Mode(true);
you are set.
No more rendering pages.
Things have changed quite a bit since this question was asked. There are now options to let Google index your AngularJS site. The easiest option I found was to use http://prerender.io free service that will generate the crwalable pages for you and serve that to the search engines. It is supported on almost all server side web platforms. I have recently started using them and the support is excellent too.
I do not have any affiliation with them, this is coming from a happy user.
Angular's own website serves simplified content to search engines: http://docs.angularjs.org/?_escaped_fragment_=/tutorial/step_09
Say your Angular app is consuming a Node.js/Express-driven JSON api, like /api/path/to/resource. Perhaps you could redirect any requests with ?_escaped_fragment_ to /api/path/to/resource.html, and use content negotiation to render an HTML template of the content, rather than return the JSON data.
The only thing is, your Angular routes would need to match 1:1 with your REST API.
EDIT: I'm realizing that this has the potential to really muddy up your REST api and I don't recommend doing it outside of very simple use-cases where it might be a natural fit.
Instead, you can use an entirely different set of routes and controllers for your robot-friendly content. But then you're duplicating all of your AngularJS routes and controllers in Node/Express.
I've settled on generating snapshots with a headless browser, even though I feel that's a little less-than-ideal.
A good practice can be found here:
http://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript/angularjs-seo-with-prerender-io?_escaped_fragment_=tag
As of now Google has changed their AJAX crawling proposal.
Times have changed. Today, as long as you're not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript or CSS files, we are generally able to render and understand your web pages like modern browsers.
tl;dr: [Google] are no longer recommending the AJAX crawling proposal [Google] made back in 2009.
Google's Crawlable Ajax Spec, as referenced in the other answers here, is basically the answer.
If you're interested in how other search engines and social bots deal with the same issues I wrote up the state of art here: http://blog.ajaxsnapshots.com/2013/11/googles-crawlable-ajax-specification.html
I work for a https://ajaxsnapshots.com, a company that implements the Crawlable Ajax Spec as a service - the information in that report is based on observations from our logs.
I have found an elegant solution that would cover most of your bases. I wrote about it initially here and answered another similar Stack Overflow question here which references it.
FYI this solution also includes hard coded fallback tags in case JavaScript isn't picked up by the crawler. I haven't explicitly outlined it, but it is worth mentioning that you should be activating HTML5 mode for proper URL support.
Also note: these aren't the complete files, just the important parts of those that are relevant. I can't help with writing the boilerplate for directives, services, etc.
app.example
This is where you provide the custom metadata for each of your routes (title, description, etc.)
$routeProvider
.when('/', {
templateUrl: 'views/homepage.html',
controller: 'HomepageCtrl',
metadata: {
title: 'The Base Page Title',
description: 'The Base Page Description' }
})
.when('/about', {
templateUrl: 'views/about.html',
controller: 'AboutCtrl',
metadata: {
title: 'The About Page Title',
description: 'The About Page Description' }
})
metadata-service.js (service)
Sets the custom metadata options or use defaults as fallbacks.
var self = this;
// Set custom options or use provided fallback (default) options
self.loadMetadata = function(metadata) {
self.title = document.title = metadata.title || 'Fallback Title';
self.description = metadata.description || 'Fallback Description';
self.url = metadata.url || $location.absUrl();
self.image = metadata.image || 'fallbackimage.jpg';
self.ogpType = metadata.ogpType || 'website';
self.twitterCard = metadata.twitterCard || 'summary_large_image';
self.twitterSite = metadata.twitterSite || '#fallback_handle';
};
// Route change handler, sets the route's defined metadata
$rootScope.$on('$routeChangeSuccess', function (event, newRoute) {
self.loadMetadata(newRoute.metadata);
});
metaproperty.js (directive)
Packages the metadata service results for the view.
return {
restrict: 'A',
scope: {
metaproperty: '#'
},
link: function postLink(scope, element, attrs) {
scope.default = element.attr('content');
scope.metadata = metadataService;
// Watch for metadata changes and set content
scope.$watch('metadata', function (newVal, oldVal) {
setContent(newVal);
}, true);
// Set the content attribute with new metadataService value or back to the default
function setContent(metadata) {
var content = metadata[scope.metaproperty] || scope.default;
element.attr('content', content);
}
setContent(scope.metadata);
}
};
index.html
Complete with the hardcoded fallback tags mentioned earlier, for crawlers that can't pick up any JavaScript.
<head>
<title>Fallback Title</title>
<meta name="description" metaproperty="description" content="Fallback Description">
<!-- Open Graph Protocol Tags -->
<meta property="og:url" content="fallbackurl.example" metaproperty="url">
<meta property="og:title" content="Fallback Title" metaproperty="title">
<meta property="og:description" content="Fallback Description" metaproperty="description">
<meta property="og:type" content="website" metaproperty="ogpType">
<meta property="og:image" content="fallbackimage.jpg" metaproperty="image">
<!-- Twitter Card Tags -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" metaproperty="twitterCard">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Fallback Title" metaproperty="title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Fallback Description" metaproperty="description">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="#fallback_handle" metaproperty="twitterSite">
<meta name="twitter:image:src" content="fallbackimage.jpg" metaproperty="image">
</head>
This should help dramatically with most search engine use cases. If you want fully dynamic rendering for social network crawlers (which are iffy on JavaScript support), you'll still have to use one of the pre-rendering services mentioned in some of the other answers.
With Angular Universal, you can generate landing pages for the app that look like the complete app and then load your Angular app behind it.
Angular Universal generates pure HTML means no-javascript pages in server-side and serve them to users without delaying. So you can deal with any crawler, bot and user (who already have low cpu and network speed).Then you can redirect them by links/buttons to your actual angular app that already loaded behind it. This solution is recommended by official site. -More info about SEO and Angular Universal-
Use something like PreRender, it makes static pages of your site so search engines can index it.
Here you can find out for what platforms it is available: https://prerender.io/documentation/install-middleware#asp-net
Crawlers (or bots) are designed to crawl HTML content of web pages but due to AJAX operations for asynchronous data fetching, this became a problem as it takes sometime to render page and show dynamic content on it. Similarly, AngularJS also use asynchronous model, which creates problem for Google crawlers.
Some developers create basic html pages with real data and serve these pages from server side at the time of crawling. We can render same pages with PhantomJS on serve side which has _escaped_fragment_ (Because Google looks for #! in our site urls and then takes everything after the #! and adds it in _escaped_fragment_ query parameter). For more detail please read this blog .
The crawlers do not need a rich featured pretty styled gui, they only want to see the content, so you do not need to give them a snapshot of a page that has been built for humans.
My solution: to give the crawler what the crawler wants:
You must think of what do the crawler want, and give him only that.
TIP don't mess with the back. Just add a little server-sided frontview using the same API