Google Sites in particular is not showing the correct link preview.for sites on Netlify - this is both for Netlify prerendering and where you are sending it to an external service (in my case prerender.io). This is a simple issue with the UA string that Google Sites is using.
I discussed with the prerender.io team and they asked that ‘googlesites’ be added to the list that is being checked for.
May I request you folks to add this on your end.
(I’ve added that to my cloudflare prerender worker and our sites on CF are now showing the correct link preview on Google Sites. So this is verified.)
Hi, @zehawki. We’ll get a PR created to add this user-agent to the list of UA string that trigger prerendering.
Once the PR is merged and roll-out to the CDN, we will reply here to let you know. (It is normally just a day or two but it can sometimes take a week to get this done due to unforeseen issues.)
We’ll follow-up again as soon as it is known to be working.
Sorry for that. It looks like this slipped through the cracks, and the PR was never created. I’ve created one now and that should be merged, hopefully soon.
We were discussing this with our engineers, and they reported that we’re not seeing any traffic for that user agent in the past 7 days (at least). They think that if it’s a common user agent that really needs to see pre-rendered content, there would probably be more requests being made to Netlify using that.
Furthermore, I tried creating a site on Google Sites to explore, what exactly can we do there that would require something to be served by Netlify. I didn’t find anything useful there. Could you please explain a bit about the use case?
I tried creating a site on Google Sites to explore, what exactly can we do there that would require something to be served by Netlify. I didn’t find anything useful there. Could you please explain a bit about the use case?
Its straight forward - just try to embed a URL and that will do a fetch from the host for generating a link preview.
Longer story:
In Google sites, lets say I want to embed MainCross Social+. This is a MainCross instance running on CloudFlare pages. It serves prerendered pages from prerender.io via a CF cloudflare prerender worker where Ive added ‘googlesites’ to the list of UA. So this works correctly.
Now if I try to embed a URL from Netlify - Veed Network, which is a MainCross instance running on Netlify. Now because Netlify is NOT sending this to prerender, so Google Sites is served the full JS with the index.html which has the default meta data, which produces an unsatisfactory link preview which is distressing our customer (who insists he wants to use Google Sites, for whatever excellent reason.)
i have asked our support engineer who knows most about pre rendering to take a look when he comes on next.
