SERA integration on Node
Kindly follow the below examples to setup the routing of bot traffic to SERA.
Prerequisites#
- All your page requests must get intercepted by below SERA routing rule
- Please check your routing, caching and cache-variation policies for that
- If caching is enabled, Users and Bots should have a separate cache-variations configured. This is to not serve the SERA’s bot-optimized-content to users.
Steps#
- Change SERA_ENDPOINT to the SERA endpoint shared with you
- Change YOUR_TOKEN to the SERA token shared with you
- Keep the relevant bot user-agent regex condition mentioned below - to control the traffic being sent to SERA
const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const port = 3000;
const seraEndpoint = 'SERA_ENDPOINT';
const seraToken = 'YOUR_TOKEN';
const n7AccessKey = 'N7_ACCESS_KEY';
//USE THIS - DURING POC PHASE for bot User-Agent regex :
const seraUserAgentPattern = /(n7TestUserAgent|google page speed|chrome-lighthouse|google-inspectiontool|PTST|GTmetrix|n7ua)/i;
//USE THIS - ON GOING LIVE ON SERA for bot User-Agent regex :
//const seraUserAgentPattern = /(n7TestUserAgent|google page speed|chrome-lighthouse|google-inspectiontool|PTST|GTmetrix|n7ua|googlebot|facebookexternalhit|bingbot)/i;
//USE THIS - ON GOING LIVE ON SERA for AI bots for bot User-Agent regex :
//const seraUserAgentPattern = /(openai|gptbot|claudebot|claude-user|perplexity-user|perplexity-bot|google-extended|google-cloudvertexbot|google-notebooklm|amazonbot|duckassistbot|metaai|metabotic|meta-externalagent|copilot|baiduspider)/i;
const seraAllowedExtnPattern = /^(|.+\.html|.+\.aspx|.+\.php)($|\?.*)/i;
const seraExludeQryPrmPattern = /\?(.*&)*(nsbp)=.*/i;
const seraExludePagePattern = /.*(\/static/|\/_next\/|\/api\/|\/login|\/logout|\/account\/|\/wishlist\/|\/cart\/|\/checkout\/|\/payment\/).*/i;
const sera = async (req, res, next) => {
const { "user-agent": userAgent, "accept-encoding": acceptEncoding, accept, referer } = req.headers;
if (req.method === "GET"
&& seraUserAgentPattern.test(userAgent)
&& seraAllowedExtnPattern.test(req.url)
&& !seraExludeQryPrmPattern.test(req.url)
&& !seraExludePagePattern.test(req.url)
&& !req.headers['x-nv-app']
&& !req.headers['x-nv-sera-bypass']) {
const headers = {
'x-nv-sera-token': seraToken,
'x-nv-access-key': n7AccessKey,
'user-agent': userAgent || '',
'accept-encoding': acceptEncoding || '',
'accept': accept || '',
'referer': referer || '',
};
const remoteUrl = `${seraEndpoint}${req.url.pathname}`; //USE THIS IF YOUR SITEMAP PAGE URLS DO NOT HAVE QUERYSTRING
const remoteUrl = `${seraEndpoint}${req.url}`; //USE THIS IF YOUR SITEMAP PAGE URLS HAVE QUERYSTRING
try {
const response = await fetch(remoteUrl, { headers });
if ((response.status === 200 || response.status === 410) && response.data) {
res.status(response.status).send(response.data);
}
else {
next();
}
} catch (error) {
console.error('error downloading page:', error.message);
next();
}
}
else {
next();
}
}
app.use(sera);
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.send('Hello World!')
})
app.listen(port, () => {
console.log(`example app listening on port ${port}`)
})Testing and Refinement#
Keep refining the logic by adjusting user-agent list, and SERA exclusion-patterns as needed.
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:
n7TestUserAgentFor mobile:
n7TestUserAgent; AndroidIf 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/537.36For 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)>
On go-live day, set the user-agent condition regex to actual bot user-agent values. Additionally, ensure that your condition is case-insensitive.
Whitelist SERA requests at your origin to avoid any issues with indexing. Details are here
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.