I have built my first rails app and am in the process of some SEO optimization. It is social networking app, so it has static pages and dynamic pages. Obviously the dynamic pages need user authentication - User Profile, Friend Search, Account Setting, Messages etc. So you need an account to access these pages? Does that mean from an SEO standpoint these pages are useless?
I have a different title for each of these pages setup. But in terms of meta tags and keywords, there is really no point in having different meta tags for each of these dynamic pages is there? Since these pages require authentication.
Would I be okay if I just include meta tags in the application.html.erb and call it a day?
Any page which requires user access can not be accessed. If the non-authenticated user can not see it, how could a crawler? Spoofing to make the website think you are a crawler is fairly easy, so that would be a huge securitybreach.
There are headers which you can send to the browser, telling it that auth is required, some bots can read those.
Also, if you include google analytics, they get some information via your authenticated user :)