Google search/SEO improvement

Anvil Q&A
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I was excited to read this in the June newsletter that @patricia sent out today:

  • Your apps now show up better in Google searches! We’ve made Anvil apps easier for Googlebot to visit, so it can now see the results of your anvil.server.call(…) execution!

My conclusion from reading old posts about SEO in the forum was that I had to use a separate static page (e.g. Wordpress) that embeds my anvil app in an iFrame in order to achieve decent SEO. Anvil apps would need server-side rendering in order for google to search and index it.

Now I’m thinking (hoping) that this has changed…

Can someone help me with the questions I have:

  1. Is the content of my anvil app (no login) landingpage indexed by google?
  2. If I have a link ‘About’ in the nav bar, will Google find and index the content under that page?
  3. Can I now make the whole landing page just in Anvil and get good SEO? :crossed_fingers:
  4. Does this improvement automatically apply to all anvil apps, or do I need to do something to an old app?

I’m sorry if I over-interpret the quote from the newsletter or repeat questions that may have been answered in other posts on the forum. But if I am confused, probably others are too.

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Good questions! This is the first step towards realising all of those goals, but right now, the only thing of your list that works is this:

  1. Is the content of my anvil app (no login) landingpage indexed by google?

Right now, if you don’t use anvil.server.call() to render your landing page, it will be indexed by google. Shortly, it will work even if you do use anvil.server.call(). (We intended to launch that this week, but we’ve hit some post deployment snags. Important lesson: announcing a feature is a great way to immediately flush out bugs :wink: ) In future, indexing multiple pages will be supported.

Watch this space!

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Thank you, @meredydd!

Great job! I look forward to multi-page indexing, so I can say goodbye to Wordpress forever!

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Hopefully that can also get my site approved on Adsense. Hurts when I am told that I have low content when my site is literally about novels.

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