I'm looking for advice regarding how to do search engine optimization for a Shiny app hosted on https://www.shinyapps.io/?
I'm not really looking for general advice but rather anything specific to Shiny apps (specifically those hosted in this way).
Do general principles for search engine optimization apply to Shiny apps? Are there specific things you can do? Are there any differences (from search engine optimization principles) with respect to Shiny apps?
First thing I would look into is whether search engines even index user apps on shinyappsio. I wouldn't be surprised if RStudio explicitly stops google from crawling those pages. I don't actually know - just wanted to bring that up as something preliminary to look into.
We do not allow crawlers to start up applications, but I suspect that if the application is not sleeping that crawlers would still have issues indexing it due to the content being delivered via SockJS. It is something we have on the backlog to investigate, but no timetable or firm plans at this time.
I actually wouldn't be surprised either way; I've heard rumors that Google crawlers can fully emulate web browsers in order to get at the content of single-page apps like Shiny.
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