SEO for AngularJS apps made easy. Based on PhantomJS and yearofmoo's article.
You will need PhantomJS to make this work, as it will render the application to HTML.
The solution is made of 3 parts:
- small modification of your static HTML file
- an AngularJS module, that you have to include and call
- PhantomJS script
Just add this to your <head> to enable AJAX indexing by the crawlers.
<meta name="fragment" content="!" />
Just include angular-seo.js and then add the seo module to you app:
angular.module('app', ['ng', 'seo']);
If you are using RequireJS, the script will detect it and auto define itself BUT you will need to have an angular shim defined, as angular-seo requires it:
requirejs.config({
paths: {
angular: 'http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/angular.js/1.0.3/angular.min',
},
shim: {
angular: {
exports: 'angular'
}
}
});
Then you must call $scope.htmlReady() when you think the page is complete. This is nescessary because of the async nature of AngularJS (such as with AJAX calls).
function MyCtrl($scope) {
Items.query({}, function(items) {
$scope.items = items;
$scope.htmlReady();
});
}
And that's all there is to do on the app side.
For the app to be properly rendered, you will need to run the angular-seo-server.js with PhantomJS.
Make sure to disable caching:
$ phantomjs --disk-cache=no angular-seo-server.js [port] [URL prefix]
URL prefix is the URL that will be prepended to the path the crawlers will try to get.
Some examples:
$ phantomjs --disk-cache=no angular-seo-server.js 8888 http://localhost:8000/myapp
$ phantomjs --disk-cache=no angular-seo-server.js 8888 file:///path/to/index.html
Google and Bing replace #! (hashbang) with ?_escaped_fragment_= so htttp://localhost/app.html#!/route becomes htttp://localhost/app.html?_escaped_fragment_=/route.
So say you app is running on http://localhost:8000/index.html (works with file:// URLs too).
First, run PhantomJS:
$ phantomjs --disk-cache=no angular-seo-server.js 8888 http://localhost:8000/index.html
Listening on 8888...
Press Ctrl+C to stop.
Then try with cURL:
$ curl 'http://localhost:8888/?_escaped_fragment_=/route'
You should then have a complete, rendered HTML output.
If course you don't want regular users to see this, only crawlers.
To detect that, just look for an _escaped_fragment_ in the query args.
For instance with Nginx:
if ($args ~ _escaped_fragment_) {
# Proxy to PhantomJS instance here
}
Running PhantomJS jobs as a daemon on the server can be very tricky. One solution is to wrap PhantomJS in a regular Node server. The Node server can be run as a daemon using forever
To use Express, first npm install to retrieve all Node dependencies. Next run something like node express-server.js 8888 http://myserver.com/ or forever start express-server.js 8888 http://myserver.com/
The Express server behaves very similarly to angular-seo-server.js; however, it does not at this time take any options as arguments. All PhantomJS options are hardcoded.