Did mobile friendly Angular kill my site SEO?

[anters]

My site used angular to become mobile friendly. Everything looks ok but when I tested it using fetch as Googlebot I saw some weird stuff. My non-mobile friendly site used includes files for the header navigation, sidebars and footer navigation lists. With my old version only I saw these include files because the final html file would just integrate the code from the include files into one html document. This gave each of my pages many relevant navigation links. This added up to a big amount of internal linking. Now when I fetch as Googlebot my new angular page, it doesn't show the html code for these navigation links. The angular code just shows the include urls. When Googlebot renders the page, it displays correctly but I am worried that Google is no longer counting these internal navigation links since the code is not integrated into the html page. Should I be worried?

[aakk9999]

I am not sure and perhaps the only way to find out is to wait to see if there is any damage to your ranking as the time progresses. Google is executing javascript but it would be difficult to say whether it would give the same weight to navigation links.

If you decide to leave it as is for now, I would make sure you have a backup plan to quickly revert the site to render the document traditionally should rankings start to slide.

How long ago did you publish changed version of your site? Have you seen any impact on rankings so far? In any case, please do report back with results and with what you decided to do.

[not2easy]

If I understand correctly, angular is a form of javascript so part of the problem may be that various forms of includes such as php are server-side (executed during/before page load) and javascript is client-side (executed during/after page load) so loading includes with javascript would result in what you are seeing.

[ACFinLA]

@anters, I've been researching SEO-friendly Angular implementation recently and came across this article: [builtvisible.com...] If you do have a ranking drop, it might be worth trying the suggested method in the article. Please keep us posted on what you're seeing. My company is contemplating a switch to full React JS framework, so I'd be interested in hearing about how switching to JS frameworks has impacted other sites.

One small section of our site is in React at the moment, and while the pages render correctly in Fetch and Render, the source code in Fetch and Render is completely different from what you'd expect given the rendered view. We've optimized the elements in the render view as best as possible, but the pages in this set do not rank as well as other similarly optimized pages on our site. Switching to full React is concerning to say the least, but if we must do it, we'll probably follow a path similar to what's suggested in the article above.