phantomjs HTML snapshot for Google bot (endless scrolling page)

Question

1. Website is PHP-based (soon it will have much more text for each post)
2. Data is requested using REST and rendered using javascript templates
3. Pages are "infinite (endless) scrolling" (it's actually finite..but consists of about 3k items)

For SEO purposes, I would need to somehow generate static HTML pages. I was thinking phantomjs (or any headless browser) which could help here, but there's a big problem with the endless scrolling, since the page must be scrolled down (or up) to render more items, phantomjs won't be able to render all the data, except data initially presented when a page loads (which is a fraction of the maximum page data).

What approach would work to statically render such a setup?
Do you guys even think that's possible?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Fetching a website with infinite scrolling will be tricky:

• The static file will be huge and Googlebot doesn't like large pages with too many links. That wouldn't give you a SEO edge.
• Fetching very long website is going to be hard. Performance will suffer and it may take very long time and likely will fail quite often.

How about just modifying the website itself and have paginated version of posts for SEO purpose?

Advantages:

• Easier to implement.
• Easier to maintain. Always updated, no need to generate static files.
• You can use it with Google Ajax Crawling specification.