…just found an update that follows an AJAX post I made 2 whole years ago. It ended on a bit of a woolly note though, along the lines of “AJAX isn’t terribly SEO friendly, but hey, what can you do?”.
A recent visit to googlewebmastercentral turned up a little gem, so that “hey, what can you do?” now nearly has an answer. Turns out you might be able to do quite a lot.
The post isn’t really a light read, but for those with a dev background it should make plenty of sense. For instance, a major part of the idea is to create a server side process whereby web servers execute their own JavaScript at crawl time.
The AJAX crawling agenda covers these points:
- Minimal changes are required as the website grows
- Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
- Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
- Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content
So, everything’s great now? Well, not according to a few of the post’s comments. Mind you this is all speculation, and those comments might have an impact on how the project progresses.
Related posts:
