What is the effect on SEO with a Meteor application?

Question

Looking at the rendered HTML source code for the todos list example, there is zero code in the body tag. How does this affect SEO?

Answer 1

EDIT: Meteor now supports serving static HTML to spiders.

From: http://docs.meteor.com/#spiderable

Can Meteor serve static HTML? Can Meteor sites be indexed by Google?

Yes. Add the "spiderable" smart package to include support for emitting static HTML to search engines, complete with valid links. The spiderable package implements Google's AJAX Crawling Specification. See the spiderable documentation for details.

This version of spiderable is specifically for search engines. A future version of Meteor will also send HTML to web browsers on inital page load. The Meteor templating system was designed specifically to support this use case.

Old and now wrong answer:

From: http://meteor.com/faq/can-meteor-serve-static-html

Can Meteor serve static HTML? Does Meteor work with JavaScript disabled on the client? Can Meteor sites be indexed by Google?

Meteor has been carefully designed to support this important use case, but it's not in the current Meteor builds. It will be part of our upcoming Routing release, which will make it easy to build Meteor sites that are aware of the current URL.

Briefly, the way server-side rendering works is that the Meteor app is started on the server and allowed to render the page. Then the session state is serialized (using the same migration technology behind Hot Code Push) and the app is frozen and pushed down to the browser, where it can optionally be restarted if the browser supports JavaScript. Since Meteor templating is based on HTML strings, not DOM manipulation, it's not necessary to run a DOM emulation package on the server.