Material-ui: Material-UI component documentation is not Google-able

[ottumm]

The documentation website does not appear to be correctly crawlable, which leads to a Google search for e.g. material-ui circularprogress to return the homepage rather than the specific component's page (see screenshot).

This is annoying at the least, fairly inefficient while developing, and, frankly, having a Google-able documentation site seems like table stakes for any software library.

[ottumm]

I noticed that http://react-toolbox.com/#/components has the same problem. Perhaps it's an issue with the documentation generator/framework you're using? Curious that this seems to be a pattern in the Material Design React Component Library world.

[Findiglay]

Google no longer indexes urls with # in them. This is the case both for React toolbox and Material-UI e.g. http://www.material-ui.com/#/components/circular-progress

From John Mueller this year:

Avoid using "#" in URLs (outside of "#!"). Googlebot rarely indexes URLs with "#" in them. Use "normal" URLs with path/filename/query-parameters instead, consider using the History API for navigation

link: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JohnMueller/posts/LT4fU7kFB8W

[oliviertassinari]

Google no longer indexes urls with # in them

We moved away from that pattern with the next branch. For instance: https://material-ui-1dab0.firebaseapp.com/component-demos/cards.
If that's not enough, we could invest in server-side rendering, that would also help to prevent regression with the SSR feature.

[mbrookes]

@oliviertassinari I understand Google should be able to index it without SSR, but while the clear leader, Google isn't the only each engine, particularly in some foreign countries, so investing in SSR for the docs (as a low priority) seems like a good idea.