Is Prerender Caching Dangerous for Google?

Question

After some trouble finding Google Crawler to analyze our AngularJS site, we use Prerender to serve a user friendly version of our pages.

This worked well - in addition to webmaster tools, it was shown that the speed of our site has deteriorated significantly due to the latency of Prerender. We are concerned that this will affect the ranking.

So, two questions:

• Does Google use Prerender pages to measure site speed - or the (true) version of our site with Javascript support? We suspect this is the first.

• One possible solution is to cache Prerendered pages. However, these cached pages may not correspond to what the user sees, due to the time delay between the page cached and returned to the crawler, for example. we can add additional products to the page, and title / metatags reflect the number of products available at any given time. Are these small differences in titles, meta descriptions, and page content sufficient to risk a fine? If so, what is the alternative to caching?

Thanks so much for any help.

Answer 1

• When it comes to crawl speed, Google uses the response time of the Prerender page. This is why it is important to cache your pages so that the Prerender server does not load the page in the browser each time. Returning cached pages will cause Googlebot to crawl your site very quickly.

• As long as you use the protocol ?_escaped_fragment_= and do not agree with the Googlebot user agent, you will not be punished for cloaking even if the pages differ in what you mentioned. Just don’t match the Googlebot user agent and don’t try to load the Prerender pages using keywords, and everything will be fine.