SEO with Prerender

Prerender integration

Galaxy provides an integrated in-house pre-rendering service to optimize your Meteor app for search engines (SEO). Our Prerender service is included as part of Galaxy at no additional cost. See

Add prerendering

Type $ meteor add mdg:seo in your app's directory to add the prerender package. Galaxy will automatically enable the Prerender.io service when you deploy your app.

If you're using the spiderable package, please remove it, since the prerender and spiderable packages are incompatible.

Confirmation

You can check to see if your changes took hold by running the curl command. If the URL of your app is www.example.com, you would run this command:

curl 'https://www.example.com/?_escaped_fragment_='

Confirm that the output contains the text that your site shows once the JS is run. If you only see a header and a reference to a script file, you may need to troubleshoot.

Testing

It's easy to run a test prerender server on your machine to check for errors. As described at prerender, first run these commands:

git clone https://github.com/prerender/prerender.git
cd prerender
npm install
node server.js

If your site is named example.com, then open another shell and use the command:

curl 'http://localhost:3000/https://example.com'

You should then see any relevant error messages, if you're experiencing an issue.

Administration and Cache Freshness

The prerendering service offered by Galaxy is designed to provide a shared service across all apps in Galaxy, with pre-determined caching policies and no need for per app management or administration through the service.

We currently offer a guarantee of at most 4 days as the cache freshness policy. There is no login available to users.

If you need to trigger your recaches for specific pages, or need to recache more frequently, we recommend that you set up your own prerender.io service.

Updated on: 14/04/2025