JavaScript Is a Must-Have, But It Comes With a Cost

There are currently 24 JavaScript frameworks and 83 JavaScript libraries. JS has become a cornerstone of modern web development. Without it, web pages look flat and uninteresting.

However, using JavaScript also carries the risk of having your website buried by Google. Here’s what you can do about it.


Prerender® Your JS


Prerender® Your Ember

What is Ember.JS?

Ember is an open-source JavaScript library used for more ambitious web development projects used for more ambitious web development projects like creating reusable and maintainable JavaScript web applications. Companies that use it include Netflix, Square, Microsoft, and LinkedIn.

One of Ember’s defining features is that it’s built on the Glimmer engine, one of the fastest rendering technologies out there. That means that your Ember pages will load at lightning speed, which will make both your users and Google happy.

Ember is designed to have more functionality straight out of the box so your developers can get straight to work without using a lot of other plugins or add-ons.

SEO Considerations With Ember

Ember has challenges similar to other SPA frameworks such as Angular or React, like getting its pages indexed by Google in a timely fashion. However, it also has solutions to those challenges that the other frameworks lack.

Plugins such as FastBoot exist to render your Ember app server-side for search engine crawlers, then revert back to client-side rendering once the required content is downloaded and available.

However, using FastBoot has some drawbacks. For one thing, the number of supported applications compatible with FastBoot is limited. It also requires you to run a full DOM when you use JQuery.

Alternatively, you can use Prerender®, which is compatible with Ember and requires no extra development time!

Prerender® Your Ember

Prerender® Your Backbone

What is Backbone.JS?

Backbone is a JavaScript library that gives structure to your web applications in the same way that a spine provides structure for the body – hence the name.

It’s a light framework that allows you to structure your JavaScript with a Model-View-Presenter format. Backbone is good for organizing your code in a way that breaks it down into semantically meaningful fields. It also has a wealth of useful documentation to support it.

There are some drawbacks, however. One common complaint is that Backbone can be confusing to work with for those who aren’t highly proficient in JavaScript. There are also SEO challenges that go along with it.

Backbone SEO Challenges

Backbone uses AJAX to make a RESTful JSON interface.

AJAX doesn’t create unique URLs for each page. Instead, it encodes each individual URL with a # map.

This is a problem when it comes to getting your Backbone pages properly indexed because Google officially stopped crawling “#!” URLs as of 2018.

Google Webmasters provides some documentation to help solve this problem. However, it’s a complicated process that takes some fiddling around with Google Search Console.

You could do that, or you could use Prerender® to properly format your URLs for you. That way, you can continue to use Backbone to its fullest potential without having to worry about whether Google will read your URLs properly.

You just make sure your Backbone web app is working, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Prerender® Your Backbone