Many myths busted indeed: How Google handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process – Vercel
But do you have issues with Google indexing your Elm SPA apps?
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Really helpful article, thanks for posting it.
I think if you follow the recomendations it can all be done with Elm. I also think elm-pages is really going to help with this. I would consider an architecture where the more static marketing side of a site is done with elm-pages, and more complex and dynamic parts are just Elm.
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It needs to be pointed out that Vercel “owns” and builds NextJS, which is their fullstack isomorphic framework that they are heavily pushing for industry mainstream adoption (and mostly succeeding at that, to be fair) as it’s tightly integrated with their Vercel platform (which is how they make money).
They have huge incentive to make claims like “streaming does not adversely impact SEO”, which may or may not be true, but the fact of the matter is Vercel doesn’t have privileged access to the Googlebot crawler algo.
Either way, it’s not up for debate that Google does crawl SPA websites, as a large portion of the web are now natively JS rendered pages. It behooves Google to not be able to crawl a significant percentage of the web. While Vercel’s finding is not surprising, I wouldn’t take their word on the matter as being final by any means.
For what it’s worth, my Elm SPA (built with elm-spa v5) doesn’t show up on Google’s index at all, but it does show up on DuckDuckGo with only the description content from the base HTML page. So clearly there is some sort of difference in how Googlebot handles rendering normal websites vs. JS websites. And this doesn’t even take into account behaviours of other crawlers.
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