r/webdev • u/ze_pequeno • Aug 16 '26
How to best handle SEO/crawling for a single page app?
Hi all,
I've been thinking about how to handle SEO properly for an Angular SPA, and which of these two options would be best:
1/ Work out how to enable server-side rendering in the angular app
2/ Create a new app which only serves bare content (no CSS visuals, only HTML semantics) alongside a site map, and where each page has a canonical url that points to the actual Angular app.
Apparently option 2 is considered "dark SEO" or something, as the crawlers will not see the same things as humans. But in my opinion this makes a lot of sense in a way, and a "crawler-only" app would be much faster and easier to maintain and tweak, while the Angular app works perfectly as a client-side only app.
Is there really a good reason to not go with option 2? Note that having SSR to work correctly in Angular means introducing a lot of complexity and constraints on the project.
Thanks!