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SEO and sharing configuration on the LFG

The RPGist's RPG Looking for Group platform already has an Angular service that updates the SEO meta tags, such as <title /> and <meta name = "description" />, according to the page the user nagivates to. You may notice that the text in the browser tab changes when you navigate from page to page and varies depending on the language in which you are using the app.

Theoretically, Google is able to process Javascript code generated by Angular, so that would be enough to solve the issue of indexing it in the search engine. However, Google's indexing and ranking rules are not very clear, and some personal tests have given the impression that this is not true in 100% of cases.

At the same time, Facebook and Twitter, for example, capture information from similar tags that are also on the pages' <head /> to build their sharing snippets for a given URL, and they do not have that ability of processing JS .

It has therefore been necessary to include such metatags statically in the app header, both to (perhaps) aid in the Google indexing and to allow social networks to be able to build their sharing snippets. This was done today.

One problem with this static solution however is that it does not allow for internationalization. For the moment, for the JS illiterate robots, this content is all in English, which will reflect on social media posts and maybe on Google results. For humans, on the other hand, the service translates the content as soon as the JS loads.

One technology that solves this problem is the Universal Angular, but implementing it in the application, as it is now, will require a some work and ain't nobody got time for that. One day I'll get there though, and I'll let you know when it happens.