React, SEO, and Pagerank
https://rubygarage.org/blog/seo-for-react-websites
https://proxify.io/articles/react-seo
React.js is arguably at the forefront of modern web development, being one of the most well received and popular frontend frameworks because of its incredible under the hood magic. However, up until as recently as 2015, there was a big problem with React: Google’s web crawler couldn’t read pages built in React. The way React works is that it is actually a bunch of Javascript that injects HTML into a webpage that is otherwise blank, meaning a web crawler just looking for HTML won’t know it has to load the Javascript and instead sees React apps as blank pages. With Google accounting for as much as up to 90% of search requests, people creating these web apps faced huge issues with Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. As we covered in lecture, Google’s page rank algorithm is much more complicated than just the distribution of pagerank scores to children – it takes into many factors on the user’s side like shopping history, location, time, etc., but it also accounts for a lot of things that web pages do, like where things are placed on a site.
Since 2015, Google has announced that it can render and index content that is dependent on JavaScript, meaning React apps should get indexed and ranked properly. BUT – many experts say that React apps and apps mostly in more standard and simple HTML are not indexed on a fair playing field. Given how much React does under the hood, it’s not surprising that there can be hiccups in interpreting the JavaScript into HTML correctly. Given how amazing React and other frontend frameworks are and how important optimizing for pagerank is, it is developers have created more frameworks to support React – such a Next.JS, which more or less turns React into HTML for the purposes of SEO. In fact, Next.JS takes it a step further and optimizes for best SEO practices to inflate pagerank.