SEO fixes when the MEAN-SEO module is used

[snez]

Fixes for various crashes when the MEAN-SEO module is used and when receiving encoded inbound links from external websites. Issues were found by inbound traffic at talentblok.com.

[apitts]

@snez I wonder if you could give some further detail on this? I've just included the MEAN-SEO module and would like to see if there are issues with inbound traffic before I go live with it. Thanks!

[snez]

@apitts sure.

For the first bit, if Google requests domain.com/?escaped_fragment=articles, phantomjs will launch and will load the application shell, render the articles section, but then ui-router will kick in and redirect to domain.com/?escaped_fragment=articles#!/ which will render the homepage. So we found that Google was caching the homepage for us for nearly the entire site. This fix will instead redirect to domain.com/?escaped_fragment=articles#!/articles when javascript is loaded so that Google will index the correct page content.

The other two bits are for when html5mode is disabled, and various links from the website are shared by email or indexed by other pages, they may be encoded. If the website receives inbound traffic from an encoded link then the front-end crashes with a white screen of death. So we make sure to decode the url before handing it to ui-router.

Also have in mind that some escaped fragment implementations, especially the ones by facebook, linkedin, twitter etc may prepend a forward slash to the path, i.e. domain.com/?escaped_fragment=/articles - this will also crash mean-seo so we use the above in combination with the following patch:
https://github.com/snez/mean-seo/blob/master/lib/mean-seo.js#L44

[apitts]

Thanks very much @snez! That's very helpful. I have html5mode enabled so it sounds like I should make the changes as per your first paragraph so that Google can index pages other than the home page and also the changes as per your third paragraph to avoid that white screen of death when linked to from some external sites. I am sure this has saved me some pain.

[apitts]

Just fyi - I got a linting error and added /*jshint nonstandard:true */ as per jshint/jshint#740 to resolve.

[apitts]

@snez - I'm actually still having a bit of an issue with this - if you have any thoughts would love to hear them!

Please see the issue I commented on here: meanjs/mean-seo#3

[codydaig]

Is this something that needs to be implemented in the 0.4.0 branch?

[lirantal]

if this is SEO related is it possible to move it to that module or somewhere else? it doesn't look very organized to put it on the main application.js file

@ilanbiala @rhutchison

[codydaig]

@lirantal @ilanbiala This no longer applies since we don't use the #! anymore. This PR can be closed.