javascript - AngularJS SEO for static webpages (S3 CDN)

Question

I've been looking into ways to improve SEO for angularJS apps that are hosted on a CDN like Amazon S3 (i.e. simple storage with no backend). Most of the solutions out there, PhantomJS, prerender.io, seo.js etc., rely on a backend to recognise the ?_escaped_fragment_ url that the crawler generates and then fetch the relevant page from elsewhere. Even grunt-html-snapshot ultimately needs you to do this, even though you generate the snapshot pages ahead of time.

This solution is basically relying on using cloudflare as a reverse proxy, which seems a bit of a waste given that most of the security apparatus etc. that their service provides is totally redundant for a static site. Setting up a reverse proxy myself as suggested here also seems problematic given that it would require either i) routing all AngularJS apps I need static html for through one proxy server which would potentially hamper performance or ii) setting up a separate proxy server for each app, at which point I may as well set up a backend, which isn't affordable at the scale I am working.

Is there anyway of doing this, or are statically hosted AngularJS apps with great SEO basically impossible until google updates their crawlers?

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Reposted on webmasters following John Conde's comments.

Answer 1

Actually this is a task that is indeed very troublesome, but I have managed to get SEO working nicely with my AngularJS SPA site (hosted on AWS S3) at http://www.jobbies.co/. The main idea is to pre-generate and populate the content into the HTML. The templates will still be loaded when the page loads and the pre-rendered content will be replaced.

You can read more about my solution at http://www.ericluwj.com/2015/11/17/seo-for-angularjs-on-s3.html, but do note that there are a lot of conditions.