SEO for Anvil apps

Feature Requests
#1

@bridget

Welcome aboard Bridget! May I assume you know the problem with SEO for SPAs? Here’s a relevant link: https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/04/09/an-seos-survival-guide-to-single-page-applications-spas/

My Anvil/SaaS app is currently invisible to Google search. Meredydd suggested that I create a “home page” on WordPress with a link to my app. He had also mentioned on an earlier occasion (Sorry Meredydd, I’m NOT throwing you under the proverbial bus :slight_smile: ) that Anvil would have some additional functionality regarding SEO for Anvil apps, but I haven’t heard anything about it since then.

Your thoughts?

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Hello from Anvil's new developer advocate
Linking to individual forms
#2

Hi Peter, and thanks for the welcome!

I am indeed aware of the problem, and thanks for the useful link.

Server-side rendering of Anvil apps would solve this problem for you and it is on our roadmap. I’ve moved this post to feature requests to flag this to the team - we’re constantly re-evaluating our roadmap based on user feedback.

Until we have server-side rendering, may I suggest:

  1. Adding a title to your Anvil app, by selecting ‘Titles and logos’ from the gear menu in the app browser
  2. Adding description and keywords meta tags to your app - this can be done in the ‘Native Libraries’ section of the App Browser. Anything you write here will be added to the <head> element of your app’s page.

Let me know if that does the trick!

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#3

I’ll try your suggestions and let you know how it works out for me.

#4

Hi everyone,

Is there already an update regarding the server-side rendering?

Or some other workaround to make our apps visible in search engines?

Best Regards,
Bob

#5

You need to get your site indexed by Google. I did it myself a month ago

https://search.google.com/search-console/about

If you face any problem with it, you can contact me.

Similarly, other search engines like Bing have fheir equivalent as well so you’ll have to request for indexing on them as well.

However, if your website is popular enough, search engines automatically index it.

#6

We have built an app on anvil.works - it is all good but google cannot index it as it returns soft 404. How can we make our app google friendly?

#7

We made a separate site for all the things that belong around the app, and do not belong inside the app. Google indexes the “wrapper” site just fine.