Dynamic rendering is the process of serving content based on the user agent that calls it. This means serving a client-side rendered version of your site for human users and a separate, server-side version for search engines.

On the server-side, javascript content is converted into astatic HTML version preferred by search engine bots. This allows them to fully access, crawl, and index webpage content. It’s one of the biggest technical SEO initiatives Google has endorsed in years. 

"Dynamic rendering is one of the most important technical SEO initiatives that Google has rolled out in the last decade."

Geoff Atkinson, Founder-CEO of Huckabuy

In 2018, Google announced its support for dynamic rendering as a workaround solution for search bots to access, crawl, and index javascript content converted to static HTML. You can watch their presentation below:

You want your content to be highly visible so that your target audience can find it while they’re scrolling the Internet. But if you have a larger website with a lot of dynamic and Javascript-driven content, search engines have a difficult time crawling and indexing your site, meaning all those content marketing efforts don’t properly reach your customers. The solution? Dynamic rendering: it allows you to serve a static HTML, SEO-friendly version of your site to Google’s search bots, so they have an improved experience and account for all of the content they might not have fully crawled and indexed previously. You’re effectively translating your website into the language that google bots know best.

Google recommends that webmasters incorporate dynamic rendering inat least three instances. First, it is recommended if you have a large site with rapidly changing content that requires quick indexing. Second, it is recommended if your website relies on modern javascript functionality. Third, it is recommended if your website relies on social media sharing and chat applications that require access to page content.

When deciding whether it makes to implement dynamic rendering for your website, it can be helpful to ask the following questions:

• Is your website indexable?
• Does your website use Javascript for some or all of your content?
• Does your content change frequently?
• Are you having crawl budget problems?
• Does your team face time and/or budget constraints that would prevent them from implementing server-side rendering?

If you can answer “yes” to any of the questions, consider using dynamic rendering for your website. 

Google prefers content written in static HTML, but they are also interested in organizing search results that reflect the internet as it is. Dynamic rendering presents an opportunity to access, crawl, and index large websites and dynamic pages that rely on frequently changing heavy javascript content.

Historically, javascript-powered websites have not fared well in search — they are user-friendly but not bot-friendly. This is attributed to the limited crawl budget of the Google Search Bot and the resource-intensive nature of rendering javascript content. When search engine crawlers encounter heavy javascript content, they often have to index in multiple waves of crawling. This fractured process results in missed elements, like metadata and canonical tags, that are critical for proper indexing.

Dynamic rendering is essentially ajavascript SEO solution. Normally, it is difficult for search engines to process these pages. They rely on static HTML elements instead of the graphical interfaces humans take for granted. But with dynamic rendering, client-side pages are translated, made fully accessible, and served to search engine bots in their preferred static HTML format, so they can access, understand, and immediately index content to be found in search. Watch Google talk about the importance of dynamic rendering for Javascript SEO:

We are often asked why the SEO community and marketing community at large have been slow to adopt dynamic rendering. Part of the reason is the fact that these departments do not have a general skillset that includes subsets of technical SEO, like Javascript SEO. Furthermore, they don’t always have the assistance of development team members who could help solve the issues then implement the solution. As a result, it is an initiative that tends to fall by the wayside as more resources are devoted to less-technical tactics like content creation and link building instead.

Implementing dynamic rendering on your own is difficult, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. A competent and experienced team of developers is required to set up a system that checks the identity of every agent visiting the website and determines which type of content to serve. It is a cumbersome process. Fortunately, Huckabuy has a software service, the Huckabuy Cloud, that takes care of this entire process for your business. After a brief period of working with your developer team, the implementation process is complete. Furthermore, our service preserves your preferred development operations. In fact, you can use the latest technologies like Angular and React without worrying about negative SEO impacts.

Think about cloaking like a classic “bait and switch.” A website might serve a page to the Search Bot about cats, but the user sees content that is fundamentally different – for example, content about dogs instead. Google takes issue with these types of cases and penalizes them accordingly. But dynamic rendering is not cloaking. It is about giving Google similar data about a page in a format that they can crawl and index quickly, easily, and cheaply as they desire.They acknowledge and support this methodology in their documentation here.

"Googlebot generally doesn’t consider dynamic rendering as cloaking. As long as your dynamic rendering produces similar content, Googlebot won’t view dynamic rendering as cloaking."

Google Documentation on Dynamic Rendering

It’s a pretty simple concept. Pages load dynamically based on what calls them. For example, if you go to a URL on your mobile phone, you’ll get one experience and if you go to the same URL on your desktop, you’ll get a slightly different experience. A site will be dynamically rendered to best fit the user experience for whatever device they’re using — mobile, tablet, desktop, and anything in-between.

Google made a huge change when they announced that you could provide an optimized version of your website, just for them. So why did they do that?

As JavaScript has taken off across the internet, Google’s job of crawling and indexing has become very difficult and requires a lot of money, time, and resources. Because almost every page on the internet now has JavaScript on it, Google’s rendering costs just became way too high. And so they started asking webmasters to serve up a separate version of sites specifically for them, one without Javascript code. 

That’s what our Huckabuy Cloud software is for. Huckabuy Cloud is a dynamic rendering solution that takes a complicated page that has 100 JavaScript tags and converts it into a flat HTML version that Google can read. You still need to have the same content and site; you can’t do any tricks like keyword stuffing or alter the page in any way. But now you can queue up what we call Google’s Perfect World of flat HTML, structured data markup, and fast page speed. 

"Unsurprisingly, if you give Google what they want, they’ll send you a lot of traffic."

Huckabuy Founder-CEO Geoff Atkinson

Geoff Atkinson recently appeared on the Search Engine Journal Show to talk about the importance of dynamic rendering and how it can be incorporated into a 2020 SEO strategy.You can find the rest of the episode show notes here. Here are some highlights of what he had to say:

“I’d say the most famous JavaScript thing that really makes Google get caught up while crawling is actually chat boxes. So chat boxes, personalization, tracking tags that are dynamic. As soon as they hit JavaScript, they simply can’t crawl it with their HTML crawler. And so it goes to a rendering queue, and a rendering queue takes quite a bit more processing time. A rendering queue is literally the same technology as your Chrome browser. So it’s just, you know, executing a page fully allowing them to come in and actually crawl that dynamic content takes more processing time. 

So, you can strip that stuff out in a dynamically rendered version. So for our Huckabuy Cloud, for example, if we were to take a customer that’s on our product and look at their actual page, in the Huckabuy Cloud, or that dynamically rendered version of the page, it almost looks identical, but it’s like 20-40%, as the size of the previous page — it’s wider, it’s faster. It’s flat HTML, it looks very similar, but you are going to see some of the dynamic stuff getting pulled out. So, chat boxes and things like that. 

The dynamically rendered version is really a simplified version that’s queued up for them so that when they come and crawl with their HTML crawler, they can literally download the entire site really quickly and don’t have to kick however many pages you have indexed over into this rendering queue — which takes processing time and a lot of money on their end. That’s why [Google’s] a fan of it.”

You could have all the content resources in the world, but if Google can’t see that actual content, what good is it doing? So, we see that a lot. Companies have bigger indexation issues than they have any idea about, because it’s kind of hard to know. You see the crawl stats, right? You’re like, “Oh, they’re crawling me. I’m good.” And you see that they’re downloading information, but you don’t really know exactly what they’re downloading and how much they are actually accessing the stuff that you’re working on. With dynamic rendering, all those problems just get eliminated. All the content’s being indexed, and content affects rankings and rankings affect traffic. So you get a pretty significant benefit. If the site is pretty heavy in JavaScript or difficult to crawl, all of a sudden, they’re going to become privy to all this new information in a very short amount of time. And that’s actually going to impact rankings and traffic and all those other good things.