Google have announced changes to their search engine that will enable AJAX content to become crawlable. No more choosing between a search engine friendly website and dynamic content, now you can use practicality and SEO to get the best of both worlds with your website.

More and more Web 2.0 social websites are appearing on the Internet, and most content for these sites is dynamic. Because AJAX content failed to be crawled by search engines, this has been restricting developers from developing better AJAX apps and slowing down the progression of website features. I know what its like sitting there trying to develop a website while attempting to perform your clients’ requests and create what is ultimately the best coding solution, but being held up by the implications your work will have on the SEO of a website … frustrating times. Trying to find a work-around can double your workload, but slowly Google is knocking down the barriers that restrict us from doing things the way we want to.

“Today we’re excited to propose a new standard for making AJAX-based websites crawlable. This will benefit webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based websites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the web.” quoted from googleblog.

This will mean those people who have applied AJAX to their sites, with dynamic content, will need to re-evaluate the content contained within. If you have not optimised the content contained with now is the time people, before it gets picked up and either dilutes or otherwise negatively affects your SEO campaign. This change does work out well considering that “almost 70% of the websites we know about use JavaScript in some form or another. Of course, most of that JavaScript is not AJAX, but the better that search engines could crawl and index AJAX, the more that developers could add richer features to their websites and still show up in search engines.”

While applying this feature, Google are trying to achieve the following:

• 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

Happy coding!

Tags: Ajax Website, search engine friendly website, Search Engines, web 2.0 social websites

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under SEO, Search Engines, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.