What is React?
React is a JavaScript library that builds interfaces that help users interact with a website. Whenever you browse a modern website and see on-screen menus, search bars, and buttons, those are usually made with React.
The SEO Drawbacks of Using React Without Prerender®
How To Optimize React Pages To Make Them SEO-Friendly
Frequently-Asked Questions
What Are Best Practices for Getting React Pages Indexed?
- Rendering your web page on the server, or using dynamic rendering to deliver your page appropriately to a bot or a human
- Making asynchronous HTTP requests only after you’ve rendered the content
- Redirecting the user to a 404 page if no content is found
- Testing each page with the Fetch as Google tool in Google Search Console
What Are the SEO Benefits of Dynamic Rendering for React?
Dynamic rendering comes with a lot of benefits that help site rankings and provide a better user experience.
- Helps Google Crawl SPAs: make your web pages easily crawlable while having the heightened performance and improved UX that comes with using JavaScript SPAs
- Faster Indexation: get your webpages ranking on Google within days, not weeks
- Faster Response Times: drop your TTFB latency drop down to almost nothing, easily pass Google Pagespeed Insights and other speed tests, and get your pages efficiently cached
- Faster (and More) Search Rankings: get more of your web pages indexed in a shorter amount of time, and take up as much real estate on Google search results as possible
- Increased Organic Traffic: The sooner your React web pages are ranking on Google, the sooner you can get start getting organic traffic and the ROI that comes with it
Can Dynamic Rendering Cause a Google Penalty?
At a surface level, it can be easy to confuse dynamic rendering with cloaking, a common black hat SEO practice notoriously used by spammy marketers and unethical website owners. Aren’t you showing Google one thing and your human users another? Technically, no. Dynamic rendering and cloaking are different. Cloaking is the practice of willfully showing a different set of content to the user-agent, whether it’s a human or a search engine crawler. That’s different from dynamic rendering, which serves that same content to humans and bots using different methods for each, which is not against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes server errors, which Google considers an error instead of cloaking. Therefore, dynamic rendering is not cloaking, nor does it cause Google penalties.
Is Prerender® Google Approved?