SERA FAQs

Refer this page to know the ways SERA can be the right fit.

Prerequisite#

1. You must have SERA integrated on your domain.

Details#

What is SERA#

SERA (Search Engine Rank Accelerator) is a service designed to improve search engine crawling and indexing efficiency by delivering optimized, crawler friendly versions of your web pages to search engine bots.

How do you integrate SERA#

You are just needed to route your bot traffic for pages to SERA.
Refer the suitable integration details page here .

Route bot traffic to SERA for all pages instead of just few page types (PLP/PDP/static/blog etc.). This will help boosting the indexing and Core Web Vital scores of whole website, and will also make it easier to debug the trend post enabling SERA.

What SERA does#

1. SERA periodically crawls your sitemap based on configured schedules.
2. SERA serves the optimized pages for Search engine crawlers.
3. Optimized page versions are cached at edge locations closer to major search engine crawlers.
4. When a supported crawler requests a page, SERA serves the preprocessed version, reducing rendering and indexing effort.

What happens when you integrate SERA#

1. By serving the preprocessed and optimized pages to Crawlers, SERA saves the time required by crawlers for analyzing and indexing them.
2. This enables bots to index more number of your sites pages in designated time (Crawl budget).

What can you expect from SERA#

• Improved Core Web Vital scores for bots during crawler and synthetic testing
• Increased search visibility
• Higher search impressions
• Growth in organic traffic over time

What can you NOT expect from SERA#

• Improvement in Core Web Vital scores for users (CRUX area). User experience metrics depend on factors such as frontend performance, network conditions, device capabilities, and application architecture.
• SEO results depend on several factors that are not manageable at SERA end - such as: content quality, website structure, competition, and search engine algorithms.
• As SERA does not serve GMC requests (if implemented as mentioned in documentation), any disapprovals or flaggings should be fixed from your end.

What things should be managed at your end#

• Maintain an updated sitemap. So that, the newly added or modified pages can be discovered efficiently.
• Setting up the rendering schedules based on the frequency at which your content changes.
  • You can manually render the pages from Dash OR can integrate the SERA render API in you CMS - to automatically trigger render job whenever any page gets updated.
• Removing the obsolete pages from SERA
  • You can do it from Dash OR use this SERA render deletion API .

Is SERA safe for business/SEO#

Yes. SERA serves content that is equivalent to the content presented to users, while optimizing its delivery for search engine crawlers. This approach aligns with search engine guidelines and is not considered cloaking when the same content is provided to both users and crawlers.
In fact, Google itself suggests using this way in their documentation . Here, it clearly states that - this way is not considered as cloaking, because it produces the same content.
As always, website owners remain responsible for ensuring content consistency and compliance with search engine policies.

Does SERA impact GMC#

No. The GMC requests need to be responded with latest page content. Therefore, SERA route should be bypassed for those.
The SERA integration documentation pages already have steps and logic for the same. (Search for nsbp query parameter there)
The change mentioned there in GMC feed product URLs does not have any business impact, as Google identifies products based on ID instead of URL (Ref Google documentation link ).

Notes#

• Also Refer the Frequently Asked Questions about SERA here