Does Wicket hamper SEO or search engines ability to crawl?

Question

We're coming from GWT projects and because of problems with SEO not liking GWT for our next project we're going to move clear of GWT (mainly because seo is a high priority for this next project). In choosing a new framework, I'm looking at Wicket and liking what I've seen so far. I've only done a few tutorials, but in looking at the war layout (from these tutorials) it looks like most of the html pages are in the WEB-INF folder.

It this going to cause problems for SEO and search engines crawling through the sites files?

Ideally, I'd like to use Wicket with some AJAX and deploy to Google App Engine.

Answer 1

It does not matter if your .jsps (or whatever) are stored in /WEB-INF. It just means they cannot be accessed directly by going to http://webapp/path/to/jsp.

For SEO think about:

• Meaningful URLs and link text (i.e. URLs should be similar to expected search engine queries)
• Crawlable pages (make sure all your content can be reached by a non-JS enabled bot... i.e. don't make content only available through AJAX, for instance). A sitemap might help

Answer 2

if you project SEO is really important than you might reconsider using a lot of ajax since crawler wont execute javascript they are not gonna read all the return of your ajax calls... that being said the SEO quality of your site is not really based on the framework you will be using ... jsut always think about img alts, links, meta, title, h1 ... in every pages and you should be fine ... also always try to post links to your site on other websites to gain visibility and get importance for crawlers

Answer 3

Look into Wicket's Bookmarkable page links and UrlCodingStrategies for a very powerful combination to use in SEO. Basicly all your links and parameters can be encoded as/a/static/url, regardless of (changing) implementation on the backend.