I work for a commerce company and our IT team is pushing to switch our JSP server-side templates over to client-side templates using a JavaScript library called Dust.js
Dust.js is a JavaScript client-side templating solution that takes the presentation layer away from the data layer. The problem with front-end solutions like this is they are not SEO friendly because all the content is being served up with JavaScript.
Dust.js has the ability to render your client-side content server-side if it detects Google bot or a browser with JavaScript turned off but I’m not sold on this as being “safe”.
Read about Linkedin switching over to Dust.js
Explanation of this: “Dust.js server side support: if you have a client that can't execute JavaScript, such as a search engine crawler, a page must be rendered server side. Once written, the same dust.js template can be rendered not only in the browser, but also on the server using node.js or Rhino.”
Basically what would be happening on the backend of our site, is we would be detecting the user-agent of all traffic and once we found a search bot, serve up our web pages server-side instead client-side to the bots so they can index our site. Server-side and client-side will be identical content and there will be NO black hat cloaking going on. The content will be identical.
But, this technique is Cloaking right?
From Wikipedia:
“Cloaking is a SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable.”
Matt Cutts on Cloaking
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355 Like I said our content will be the same but if you read the very last sentence from Wikipdia it’s the “present but not searchable” that gets me.
If our content is the same, are we cloaking?
Should we be developing our site like this for ease of development and performance?
Do you think client-side templates with server-side solutions are safe from getting us kicked out of search engines?
Thank you in advance for ANY help with this!
