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Show HN: Renderproxy – Make your app crawlable without a line of code

11 points by fragosti 7y ago

fragosti 7y ago
The idea for Renderproxy came to me while at work. Our website is completely written in React and was having some SEO issues. Single Page Apps have a hard time being crawled by search engine bots, and one way to fix this is to implement dynamic rendering (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-rendering https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-ren...), such that bots get served up a pre-rendered version of your site. Google recommends this. Looking online, I was hoping to find something like Renderproxy, but all the solutions I found required me to run my own server, or switch hosting providers. We ended up implementing our own custom solution. With this solution, all you need to do is sign up for Renderproxy, and change your DNS settings.
mschulmano 7y ago
Took me five mins to get working, seems like a solid way to save a week or so of work that you'd otherwise have to do to get dynamic rendering working. Seems promising.
yunusabd 7y ago
Great idea, it can be a real hassle to set up SSR. Is there a chance that it would be considered cloaking by Google, because you're serving a page from a different IP to the crawler?
- fragosti 7y ago
  According to Google, as long you're being honest it's not considered cloaking. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-rendering#cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-ren...
  - yunusabd 7y ago
    Sounds reasonable. Have you seen results yet in terms of SEO performance with your company's page?
    - fragosti 7y ago
      Yea especially when you're using things like https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet to set meta tags in JS --it's not going to work unless you're using something like this. The descriptions and titles for our pages started showing up in google after implementing dynamic rendering, and our rankings seemed improved as well.
      - yunusabd 7y ago
        Nice one, good luck with your project!
rgmvisser 7y ago
Great idea for still having a custom domain without having to pay for premium features on website builders

11 points by fragosti 7y ago

The idea for Renderproxy came to me while at work. Our website is completely written in React and was having some SEO issues. Single Page Apps have a hard time being crawled by search engine bots, and one way to fix this is to implement dynamic rendering (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-rendering https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-ren...), such that bots get served up a pre-rendered version of your site. Google recommends this. Looking online, I was hoping to find something like Renderproxy, but all the solutions I found required me to run my own server, or switch hosting providers. We ended up implementing our own custom solution. With this solution, all you need to do is sign up for Renderproxy, and change your DNS settings.

mschulmano 7y ago

Took me five mins to get working, seems like a solid way to save a week or so of work that you'd otherwise have to do to get dynamic rendering working. Seems promising.

yunusabd 7y ago

Great idea, it can be a real hassle to set up SSR. Is there a chance that it would be considered cloaking by Google, because you're serving a page from a different IP to the crawler?

fragosti 7y ago
According to Google, as long you're being honest it's not considered cloaking. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-rendering#cloaking https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/dynamic-ren...
- yunusabd 7y ago
  Sounds reasonable. Have you seen results yet in terms of SEO performance with your company's page?
  - fragosti 7y ago
    Yea especially when you're using things like https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet to set meta tags in JS --it's not going to work unless you're using something like this. The descriptions and titles for our pages started showing up in google after implementing dynamic rendering, and our rankings seemed improved as well.
    - yunusabd 7y ago
      Nice one, good luck with your project!

rgmvisser 7y ago

Great idea for still having a custom domain without having to pay for premium features on website builders