Are Meteor apps indexable by search engines?

Question

As far as I know, Google will index a page if it meets at least one of two conditions:

1. The page loaded with javascript off has content.
2. If the page requires javascript it is located at a url under a hashbang. Like this: http://www.example.com/#!/page-name

If I have that right, then meteor apps (like meteor.com, which lacks content when javascript is off) won't be indexed by Google.

Did I miss something? Is there some other mechanism in play or planned to make meteor apps indexable?

Answer 1

I made a smartpackage to get some basics for crawling ready. https://github.com/lvbreda/meteor_seo_smartpackage
Check it out, fork it, whatever you want .

Answer 2

tl;dr : Simple indexing is now included in the spiderable package, more features are planned for an upcoming release.

Recently added to the meteor FAQ:

Can Meteor serve static HTML? Can Meteor sites be indexed by Google?

Yes. Add the "spiderable" smart package to include support for emitting static HTML to search engines, complete with valid links. The spiderable package implements Google's AJAX Crawling Specification. See the spiderable documentation for details.

This version of spiderable is specifically for search engines. A future version of Meteor will also send HTML to web browsers on initial page load. The Meteor templating system was designed specifically to support this use case.

Answer 3

No, they aren't because they give back an empty page and they don't execute the sockjs stuff. The devs plan to work on server side rendering which gives a page with inital data to start of with such that search engines can store such data. It's a bit trickier than the AJAX that Google processes...

Answer 4

Checkout DerbyJS and Yahoo Mojito. Both frameworks are SEO friendly.

SEO and latency issues with Javascript frameworks