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I have an Angular single page app.

Google started rendering JavaScript when crawling pages in mid-2014, but do Yahoo and Bing also interpret JavaScript when they crawl pages?

Do I need to include them in my Prerender.io configuration?

unor
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Seamus James
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1 Answers1

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As of today there is no indication that Bing (which powers Yahoo search) parses and processes JavaScript the same way as Googlebot does. So if you want them to be able to read content delivered by JavaScript you should take whatever steps necessary to make that possible.

John Conde
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  • This gives the implication that Bing doesn't handle JavaScript at all. See stackoverflow.com/a/1785101/8384 and blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2014/11/03/meet-our-mobile-bots – McKay Sep 14 '15 at 14:26
  • @McKay Those require using pushState which Google does *not* require as it can process javascript without it. That's a very big difference. – John Conde Sep 14 '15 at 15:38
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    From what I can tell, process the javascript as the user sees it, but provided specific guidance to help your users. ie. make sure that if you pushstate and the users (or a crawler) go to that url, that it works. – McKay Sep 15 '15 at 18:04
  • That's the difference. Google doesn't *need* that. Bing does. – John Conde Sep 15 '15 at 18:17
  • I don't think Bing does either. They're just trying to make it so that viewers who visit the link actually see the content at that link when the crawler executed the pushstate.. – McKay Sep 15 '15 at 18:47
  • They do (or we have to assume they do as there is no evidence they support JavaScript like Google does and have not announced anything either). – John Conde Sep 15 '15 at 20:10
  • "More and more, search engines crawl the web “as users see it”, that is, hydrating the web page and loading JavaScript etc. and Bing has been doing this for quite some time." – McKay Sep 15 '15 at 20:37
  • Bing does NOT index JS rendered pages. Search for 'keyword 3139238811' in Google vs Bing. Bing will not return page: http://danielsokolowski.com/bing-js-parsing-test.html – Daniel Sokolowski Oct 10 '17 at 14:25
  • @McKay you say Bing is doing "as users see it"? However, from my observation, it doesn't do that. I have a SPA app. I see Bing crawls my pages without calling the APIs (normally called in ngInit) based on my server log. See my question [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50299587/why-is-bing-crawler-not-fetching-the-dynamic-content-of-my-angular-web-page). – newman May 13 '18 at 01:04