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SERA integration on other web-servers

If you are using web-server, for which SERA integration steps are not provided here, just follow the below steps.
Sending request to SERA is simple, all you need to is SERA token and a simple proxy configuration.

  1. Identify Matching Requests

    1. User-Agent Pattern

      • Requests matching with only the mentioned bot user-agents should be sent to SERA.
        You can define a regular expression or other matching criteria to identify requests that should be proxied to SERA.
        • DURING POC PHASE USE THIS User-Agent regex to match crawlers :
          /(n7TestUserAgent|PTST|GTmetrix)/
        • ON GOING LIVE ON SERA USE THIS User-Agent regex to match crawlers :
          /(googlebot|google\ page\ speed|chrome-lighthouse|google-inspectiontool|PTST|GTmetrix)/

    2. File Extension Pattern

      • Only the page request patterns should be sent to SERA
        You can exclude all non-HTML requests using a pattern like :
        ~*\.(ai|ashx|asmx|aspx|avi|avif|bmp|css|csv|dat|dmg|doc|eot|exe|flv|gif|ico|iso|jpeg|jpg|js|json|jsp|less|m4a|m4v|mov|mp3|mp4|mpeg|mpg|ogg|otf|pdf|php|png|ppt|psd|rar|rss|svg|swf|tif|torrent|tf|txt|wav|webm|webp|wmv|woff|woff2|xls|xml|zip)
        Keep updating this path for any API/sitemap-excluded requests.

    3. Page Exclusion Pattern

      • Few page requests should never be sent to SERA e.g. login or checkout flow
        You can exclude them using a pattern like :
        ~*.*/(api|login|logout|account|wishlist|cart|checkout|payment).*
        Keep updating this path for any API/sitemap-excluded requests.

    4. GMC Query Parameter Pattern

      • You need to add "nsbp" query paramater to all product page URLs in GMC feed.
        These requests should be sent to origin instead of SERA for always fetching latest content (to avoid GMC exclusions due to old data)
        You can use some regex like below :
        ~*.*\?(.*&)*nsbp=.*

    5. SERA Internal Request Headers

      • Exclude the requests with these 2 request-Headers :
        x-nv-app

        x-nv-sera-bypass

  2. Configure Proxy

    1. Proxy Server/Module

      Use a proxy server or module that supports conditional forwarding based on request headers.
      Examples include: Nginx (for reference, not implementation-specific), Apache HTTPd with mod_proxy.

    2. Proxy

      • Proxy Target

        Set the proxy target to the SERA server i.e. https://sera.n7.io/
        e.g. Below page :
        https://www.example.com/app/1v1/home.html
        should be proxied to SERA like :
        https://sera.n7.io/app/1v1/home.html
        (with request header x-nv-sera-token: <token>)

      • SERA Token Addition

        Add a request header to the above forwarded request with SERA token as :

        x-nv-sera-token: <your-token>

      • Forwarding Conditions

        Implement logic to forward requests based on: - Matching user-agent pattern - url pattern to pass only required page requests to SERA

  3. Handle Responses

    1. Proxy Response

      • Forward the response from SERA back to the crawlers.

  4. Testing and Refinement

  5. Keep refining the logic by adjusting user-agent list, and SERA exclusion-patterns as needed.

  6. Test thoroughly:

    • WPT and GTMetrix will automatically receive the response from SERA due to the routing rule set above.

      • Steps to validate page using WPT

    • To check the SERA rendered page on browser, you can use DevTools > Network conditions facility, or some browser extension (like Simple modify headers) to manipulate the browser user-agent.
      If in testing phase, use these user-agent values:
      For desktop: 

      n7TestUserAgent
      For mobile: 
      n7TestUserAgent; Android
      If SERA is live, you can use these actual bot user-agent values:
      For desktop: 
      Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<http://www.google.com/bot.html)> Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36
      For mobile: 
      Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +<http://www.google.com/bot.html)>

  7. On go-live day, set the user-agent condition regex to actual bot user-agent values. Additionally, ensure that your condition is case-insensitive.

  8. After go-live, in any dashboards created for monitoring the "actual user traffic" e.g. Google analytics, exclude the requests with user-agent string containing word "Nitrogen SERA" to get correct understanding about user-traffic.