Rude: A site that optimizes for speed to gain an SEO boost, does not deserve this SEO boost. A site like Pinterest should optimize for speed, regardless of what Google says.
If you turn back an experiment meant to enhance usability and engagement, you show that you care more for search engines than for search engine users. You are of course free to place your priorities so that your business survives, but then you can't make a claim to the woes of a whitehat SEO and you will drown in a turmoil of mystification and algo update-fears.
I do not understand why they even experiment with javascript rendering to increase the page-speed when they do not even currently defer loading of javascript to </body>. There are a lot of requests that could be combined into a single request and they could save over 50%(!) of the resource size by minifying html and lossless compression of the pinned images on pinimg.com. The mobile site gets a pagespeed score of 58 / 100. This could be 90+ / 100. It should be 90+ / 100 before you even think of javascript rendering. And if you go down that route, better study WAI-ARIA, before you make your site inaccessible to some. Good SEO follows from good design, good development, good content strategy, good UX, good accessibility. All of these things can be optimized in isolation and will benefit SEO.
If by javascript rendering they meant one of those fancy endless scrolls, then it is likely they did not implement this correctly. You can expect a lot from a bot that is able to parse javascript, but not that it spends 2 minutes scrolling down with the mouse till it reaches the end of a board and has seen all the content.
Comments
Rude: A site that optimizes for speed to gain an SEO boost, does not deserve this SEO boost. A site like Pinterest should optimize for speed, regardless of what Google says.
If you turn back an experiment meant to enhance usability and engagement, you show that you care more for search engines than for search engine users. You are of course free to place your priorities so that your business survives, but then you can't make a claim to the woes of a whitehat SEO and you will drown in a turmoil of mystification and algo update-fears.
I do not understand why they even experiment with javascript rendering to increase the page-speed when they do not even currently defer loading of javascript to </body>. There are a lot of requests that could be combined into a single request and they could save over 50%(!) of the resource size by minifying html and lossless compression of the pinned images on pinimg.com. The mobile site gets a pagespeed score of 58 / 100. This could be 90+ / 100. It should be 90+ / 100 before you even think of javascript rendering. And if you go down that route, better study WAI-ARIA, before you make your site inaccessible to some. Good SEO follows from good design, good development, good content strategy, good UX, good accessibility. All of these things can be optimized in isolation and will benefit SEO.
If by javascript rendering they meant one of those fancy endless scrolls, then it is likely they did not implement this correctly. You can expect a lot from a bot that is able to parse javascript, but not that it spends 2 minutes scrolling down with the mouse till it reaches the end of a board and has seen all the content.