There are many ways to build web sites, some are better for Google and some are not. Going with SPA (single-page application) approach provides some of those challenges.
But one developer at StackOverflow thought it would be considered cloaking to use a pre-render service to show Google what content was n the page. The issue with SPA is that the HTML index page loads a blank page, there is no content in the HTML. So Google may see nothing. But the truth is, Google now renders the page as the user would see it - for the most part.
In any event, Google's Gary Illyes said this would not be against Google's guidelines and it is not cloaking. Of course, that is assuming the content the user sees represents what you put in the HTML for Google to see.
Gary said:
This is not cloaking, we (Google) wouldn't penalise for that.Please take a look at the Ajax Crawling Scheme, which essentially describes the same thing, except it works on different URLs.
You can do this on any URL. One thing to keep in mind though, is that most big search engines, including Google, already renders the pages just like a normal browser would, so perhaps you don't even need to create the HTML snapshot.
I thought that Google wanted to deprecate the AJAX schema/?
In any event, good to have Google on record about this again.
Forum discussion at StackOverflow.
