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Comment by ulisesrmzroche | Hacker News Reader

SEO should not be a problem, doesn't matter if it's client-side or server side. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/

Code size can't be ignored because the JS community at large values small modular components, i.e., Sinatra over Rails. Libraries live or die mostly by popularity, so there you go.

The trade-offs you listed are not really significant. We all pick up frameworks and languages almost any year anyway, and the comments about client-side SEO are just way off.

I keep harping on this bit, but that keeps popping up in HN all the time. Again, client-side apps won't hurt your SEO, and there's even services based around it like http://seo4ajax.com

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Because SEO is so important, you should be really careful about the sort of assertion you're making - most people will read your post and assume that the googles can read html generated by js template rendering. AFAIK, this is false, and this is a huge problem for single page js apps - they're often SEO crippled.

Most people running js webapps are not following google's ajax webcrawling directives or paying seo4ajax to solve the problem for them. It's irresponsible to say that there's no SEO problem with client side rendering.

But there's a right way to do it already, and the definition of a solved problem is one people are making money off, so steering people away from js webapps because of SEO is just bad

There are no large caveats here, either follow a tutorial off Google Dev Guides or pay someone like $5 bucks a month to do it.

Gawker did this a while back. And reverted after their Google rankings took a hefty plunge. That is one very large caveat, that Ajax crawler spec is no magic bullet.

Nick Denton: "Dip in uniques largely because of drop in Google refers. Pageviews (which are driven more by core audience) less affected." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61152134929981440

Nick Denton: "Google does not fully support "hashbang" URLs. So we're eliminating them rather than waiting for Mountain View." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/61465859079671808

Nick Denton: "Yeah, I'd advise against hashbang urls. Will kill search traffic -- even if you abide by Google protocol." -- http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/62595141927583745

And while google certainly is important, it isn't the only crawler. Others are important both in "absolute" terms (duckduckgo/bing ?) -- and for "local" and possibly "domain" search (yandex, baidu).

Not to mention internal crawlers for site-wide search (although you can of course adapt those -- why do it if you don't have to?).

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