#server-side-js-render

This repo is a collection of examples illustrating how to use phantomJS to pre-render javascript pages on the server the purposes of Serch engine optomization. This blog post describes the general concept.

All of these examples require PhantomJS

##Basic

This is a very simple example using a nodejs server and a trivial amount of javascript to show off the gist of the concept. In this example, the index.html displays a simple message. This page is passed to a PhantomJS script via a nodeJs static server. The node server can be initialized with pre-rendering enabled or disabled. When pre-rendering is disabled, viewing the source (not the element inspector), will reveal an empty h1 tag even though the message is displayed. When pre-rendering is enabled, viewing the source will reveal that the h1 tag has a value equal to the javascript assignment. If you were a search engine spider, that h1 would look like it was part of a static page and not dynamic javascript.

Starting the server with pre-rendering disabled.

$ node server.js 8888 false

Starting the server with pre-rendering enabled.

$ node server.js 8888 true