Semalt Speaks About Rendering And Its Impact On SEO

Dynamic rendering is a concept that Google introduced at Google's 2018 I/O conference. Although websites were practicing rendering, John Mueller went into details as to what it means. 

A version of what dynamic rendering means will be the principle of sending normal content rendered to the client's needs and sending a fully rendered server version of said content to the search engine.

On June 30th, Bing released an interesting Webmasters Guideline that recommends Dynamic rendering. This is a clear indication of how vital dynamic rendering is when switching between client-side rendered and pre-rendered content for specific user agents. 

So Bing and Google, which are two of the biggest search engines, have recommended Dynamic Rendering as a solution. As SEO experts, it is important that we understand this concept, when we should use it, and what implications we should watch out for. 

Dynamic rendering is pre-rendering that sends fully rendered content to search engines while serving visitors with the regular content you see when you open a page. It creates and serves a static HTML version of your page to search engine bots. 

With this technique, a web page renders differently depending on which user agent makes the request. It will switch between client-side rendered content and pre-rendered content for a certain user agent. 

In a nutshell, Dynamic Rendering sends the normal version of your site to the client but converts your dynamic content into flat HTML, which it sends to the search engine. A search engine like Google can now crawl and index your site without executing JavaScript. 

Google seems to think Dynamic Rendering is for every website. They say dynamic rendering is good for indexable, public JavaScript-generated content that rapidly evolves. 

Because of Dynamic Rendering, search engine bots can crawl a site better. Therefore more of the content on your website gets indexed. 

Specifically, we will say Dynamic Rendering is mostly needed by sites struggling with their crawl budget issues.

We also know that it is easier to deploy and less expensive when compared with its alternatives. While server rendering will require a longer installation process, dynamic rendering can be deployed quickly. While pre-rendering is a very expensive endeavor. 

Do you still think you don't need dynamic rendering? 

Martin Splint from Google has said that Google doesn't want to rely on Googlebot to render JavaScript solely. Having an alternative never hurts. 

With our level of technology, it is very difficult for search engine bots to process JavaScript. Currently, not all search engine bots can process JavaScript accurately and quickly. While we are sure that this problem will be fixed in the future, we still find ways to mitigate the damage in the meantime. 

Look at Google as an example. The Google Search Engine has a rendering queue and two waves of indexing. Google does this because its HTML crawler can't process JavaScript. So when a bot catches it, it sends the page into another rendering queue where it waits for its rendering resources to become available. Only when this happens is Google able to render the page fully. 

Bing is in the same boat with Google on this subject. To clarify their position on this, they recently updated their Webmasters Guidelines. 

In their update, they recommended Dynamic Rendering to its SEO experts. Larger websites are being told to have this as it will help their SEO campaign. 

Having a dynamic rendering solution on your page means that search engine bots (Googlebot, Bingbot, and other search engine crawlers) will meet a fully rendered page. Which means less work for them. On your part, you can rest better because you know that the less load you've created means the search engine will spend more time going through your pages and indexing content. 

One of the biggest issues Dyanamic Rendering solves is crawl budget issues. Let's break it down. 

Both your web users and search engine bots are affected by page speed. While users get frustrated with a slow site, crawl bots are unable to crawl many of your pages because your crawl budget will expire faster.

Dynamic rendering is the perfect solution because it reduces the time bots have to spend on each page/content. 

Large sites filled with heavy JavaScript can now more of their pages indexed. No more crawl budget issues. Search Engines like Bing and Google can only spend little amounts of time on websites. To save resources, they developed limits for how much time their bots spend on a page per time. We call this limit crawl budget. And every website has its own crawl budget. 

These limits make it difficult for search engine bots to crawl pages on large websites. We believe that google misses a significant percentage of a page from all large enterprise websites. So having JavaScript slowing the bots any further is a significant problem. 

One of the biggest disadvantages we face as SEO experts are that more resources are devoted to keeping the users happy and not making things easier for us. That is simply the nature of our industry, so most engineering and dev teams focus their objectives on developing the user experience. This is why they discover and solve UX issues and projects quickly. 

Dynamic rendering saves both time and resources. In a shorter period, dynamic rendering can yield significant improvements and not require as many resources. Its affordability and simplicity have made implementing it much easier. 

No. Dynamic rendering becomes cloaking only when you use it to send a different version of your page to search engine bots. What you're sending to the visitors and search engine bots must be the same. 

According to Google, dynamic rendering isn't cloaking. From Google's definition of cloaking, it is the practice of sending different content or links to search bots and humans. If you can recall our definition of dynamic rendering, you will see that you're perfectly fine. 

Google attacked cloaking in its early days. Back then, cloaking was used to inflate a page's ranking on SERP by tricking search engines. 

But if you're wondering if it is possible to clock with dynamic rendering, Yes, you can. We do not recommend you try this. 

We've had clients who prefer using server-side rendering as opposed to dynamic rendering. Since dynamic rendering doesn't improve the user experience, not everybody is interested in installing it. With a severe side render, all the meaningful pages get rendered on the website's server. This also makes it easy for both users and search engine bots to load pages without the need to request more resources successfully. This takes away the burden on you, your audience, and search engine bots. 

We recommend dynamic rendering only because it is significantly less time and resource-intensive. 

Both methods perform almost the exact functions, but dynamic rendering does it faster. This means you can give search engines want and get your engineering team working on the next task in no time. 

Do you have any questions concerning dynamic rendering? We would love to hear them and provide solutions. If you feel there is something important we should know, kindly contact us. Dynamic rendering is rather new, and we're still learning a lot. As we learn more, we will keep you updated. 

Interested in SEO? Check out our other articles on the Semalt blog.