Angular2 SEO - How to make an angular 2 app crawlable

Question

I am building an Angular 2 app using the Angular-Meteor framework.

I would like to achieve fast and consistent indexing by google and other search e

Answer 1

Serverside rendering is not a requirement for a decent google ranking ...

I had a forum with about 33.000 entries in its google sitemap files. This website was written using asp.net webforms, and had a decent stream of incoming requests from google. This website did have very bad mobile readability (something that is penalized by google, it actually mentioned this in my google "search console")

I rewrote everything with angular (deployed version is angular5). I am using the Title and Meta services to set my title and meta tags. All routes contain keywords extracted from the actual content. I also made sure that every element with a [routeLink] attribute was an A tag on which i also specified the href element (that is what a crawler looks for ...) And of course i paid a lot of attention to mobile readability.

Result: i actually get more incoming traffic than before, and in the search console i clearly see that my indexed pages went up: of the 30k+ pages, only about 10K were included in the index. Now i have almost 25k pages in the index.

I am not saying that serverside rendering is irrelevant. Using universal or other methods will result in faster download times, which will probably lead to a higher score. But google is definitely able to properly index an angular SPA.

edit: some proof: if you google "3ds max threadripper", you'll see that it actually outranks one of the biggest hardware sites on the internet.