React is designed to create interactive modular and cross-platform interactive user interfaces. Currently, it is a very much popular JavaScript framework for writing effective front-end applications. Originally developed for writing single-page applications (SPAs), React is now used to create complete websites and mobile apps.
If you have experience in web development and you switch to React, you will find that your HTML and CSS code is increasingly converting to JavaScript. This is because React doesn't recommend creating or updating UI elements directly but rather describing the "state" of the user interface. React then updates the DOM to match the state in the most efficient way possible.
Therefore, any changes to the user interface or DOM must be made through the React engine. While this is convenient for developers, it can have longer loading times for end-users and more indexing tasks for search engines.
In this article, we'll look at the challenges you face in building SEO-optimized React apps and websites and outline strategies you can use to overcome them.
Google gets over 90% of entire online searches. Let's understand via pointers about its crawling and indexing process.
- Googlebot maintains a crawl queue that contains all URLs that need to be crawled and indexed in the future.
- When the crawler is idle, it picks up the next URL in the queue, requests it, and receives the HTML.
- After analyzing the HTML, Googlebot determines whether it needs to fetch and execute JavaScript to render the content. If yes, the URL is added to the render queue.
- Other times, the renderer fetch and run JavaScript to display the page. This sends the rendered HTML back to the CPU.
- The processing unit takes all the <a> tags URLs mentioned on the website and adds them to the crawl queue.
- The content will be added to the Google index.
Note that there is a clear difference between the processing step that parses the HTML and the renderer which executes the JavaScript.
This distinction is made because JavaScript is costly to implement, given that Google bots must display more than 130 trillion web pages, according to the search engine land. When Googlebot crawls a web page, it immediately parses the HTML and then queues the JavaScript. The Google documentation says that the page stays in the view queue for a few seconds, although it could be longer.
Also, it is worth mentioning the concept of crawl budget. Google crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability. It is based on Googlebot instances. It allocates a certain budget or indexing resources for each website. If you create a large, content-rich website with thousands of pages (such as an ecommerce website) and those pages use a lot of JavaScript to display the content, Google may read less content from your website.
Why is SEO Optimization for React Challenging?
Software developers need to identify potential problems because of search engines while crawling, and indexing React pages.
We will see the closer on what makes React SEO complicated or challenging and what developers can do to overcome this issue:
Empty content of the First pass:
React applications trust mostly JavaScript and often have trouble with search engines. This is because React uses a standard application shell model. The original HTML contains no meaningful content, and the user or bot must run JavaScript to display the actual page content.
This approach means that Googlebot will find a blank page the first time it switches. Content is only visible to Google when the page is displayed. This slows down content indexing when you are working with thousands of pages.
To know more - https://katalysttechnologies.weebly.com/blog/react-seo-its-optimization-practices
While it may seem like a simple concept, but it takes years to master.
Likewise, it takes a while for new websites to gain traction and establish themselves with good SEO practices.
So how should new websites develop an SEO strategy?As a member of a team that does this day in and day out, here’s a few SEO tips and tricks that you can use to get a bigger slice of the pie.Let’s dive into the basics of SEO services for new websites:1.
A solid and planned structure helps Google understand where the heart of your site lies, which helps index swiftly.
Moreover, it helps business houses prevent similar pages from competing with one another and puts up the most relevant and essential pages in the pyramid.
Having a clean and organized structure also makes it easier for your website visitors to find out what they need, enabling you to offer a positive user experience.The websites can be made clearer by providing clickable links and breadcrumbs on your page, offering a more visible trail so users know where they currently are on your site.
Data MigrationData migration includes customer details, cart details (including transactions, order info, and sales history), product catalogs and categories, and CMS content (including blogs and any other existing informative website content).
URL Redirects and 404 ErrorsEvery landing page URL (Uniform Resource Locater) is tracked and stored by search engines.
Usually, developers and professional eCommerce web development services retain old URLs for products, categories, and CMS pages for a new migrated platform.
404 is a standard response code indicating the inability of a browser to find a web page.
It is also responsible for maintaining the SEO page ranking.
This is an HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) response notifying Google and other search engines regarding the relocation of a requested web page.
In the recent Google Search Central SEO hangout recorded on 19th February 2021, Google’s John Mueller has answered some questions about best SEO practices for news sites, especially since it relates to uploading short articles.According to Mueller, news websites need not worry too much about the length of their articles as sometimes short content is better for a given search query.During the latest Google Search Central SEO hangout, Mueller answered a question put forward by an SEO practitioner who manages a news website.
She wanted to know the risks of having shorter articles regarded as thin content.Further adding to her statement, she said that she is even thinking about noindex-ing the shorter articles, which can be as short as a paragraph in length, in case this will help her website in search rankings.Now, these concerns are valid since Google is known to devaluate thin content.Moreover, Google’s Panda update is designed to minimize the prevalence of low-quality thin content in the SERPs.So now the actual question is – what should the SEO do?
Should she noindex the shorter articles on her news website so that Google does not see the thin content?Let’s see what Google’s John Mueller recommends.Since this relates to placing a noindex tag on the shorter articles, Mueller says that it depends on whether the website owner wants to index these pages or not; it’s their place to decide.However, Mueller thinks that a noindex is not needed here simply because the articles are short as, at times, even the smaller ones can be sufficient.In his statement, Mueller said that if you do not want those articles to show up in the search results, you can use a noindex tag, but he thinks no-indexing an article is not required just because it is a small news article.Further, he said that he would not be so much concerned with the article’s length but instead would focus on whether or not he wants to index it.To this, the SEO responded that she wants her articles indexed in the search results, but she is concerned about sending out any negative signals to the search engine with thin content.In an attempt to encourage her, Mueller further adds that Google does not care about the article’s length for web search.
However, he is unaware if there is any policy around Google News.
Since the SEO particularly mentioned that this is about articles on a news site, Mueller said that he roughly remembers a few mistakes Google had in Search Console, way in the beginning where it would display that this news article is too long or too short.
Perhaps that is something that plays a part there regarding news content writing.
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