Will Google crawl and index a site to be developed in Ajax?

[dkrawat]

I am in team where we are developing a big portal. This portal is to be developed in .net and ajax. I wanted to know what are the impacts on crawling and ranking in Google and other search engines if we use ajax. There is no content when I see view source. What is the best solution should we go with ajax or need to drop the idea if want sites in good ranking in all search engines please let me know.

[Andy Langton]

There is an "offical" fix to the ajax crawling problem:

[developers.google.com...]

In addition, Googlebot makes it's own attempt to discover links in non-standard sources, but I wouldn't rely on this.

My opinion is that a purely AJAX-powered site is not a good idea at this stage. Most people opt for Ajax as an add "layer" on top of a more standard version which is crawlable in the usual way. I would recommend this approach if search performance is a key factor.