Search engines read sections of a page opened with Ajax?

[csdude55]

I have a few sections of my homepage that load remote XML feeds. Even though they cache it locally for a period of time (15-30 minutes), there's still a chance of the occasional delay of up to 30 seconds while fetching new data.

So now I'm loading these in an Ajax script instead of directly from the page.

My question is, will Google and other search engines still read the data that's on these Ajax-fetched pages as part of the homepage? It's not a big deal either way, I just need to know how much attention to pay them for SEO.

[not2easy]

Google does parse the Ajax and read what would be seen by a visitor. I had a link for their explanations and optimizations but that link says the tech is deprecated. Not because they can't or don't crawl it, but because they don't consider it reliable. You can read the article and video at Seroundtable [seroundtable.com] (about one year old) for more info.

Bing's bot does ajax, or claims to. You can read their suggestions [bing.com] for tempting Bing.
I do not know if other bots are capable, some of them don't seem to read even robots.txt with any comprehension. I would try to follow their informational link (in the UA) to check.



_{Edited to update link}

[csdude55]

Hmm. From the Seroundtable article:

Make sure you control what you can by really blocking Google from it or making it super accessible for Google to access it - depending on if you want the content indexed or not.

How does one make an Ajax script "super accessible"? Or does he mean, by not relying on Ajax?

[not2easy]

If you want the content indexed as part of the content on the page, allow access to everything involved. If you prefer the content not be crawled and indexed as part of the page, it could be in a /scripts/ folder (for example) and Disallowed.

I see that as referring to the possibility that sections might be for certain visitors "only" such as members or subscribers. Of course I don't know the reason the "warning" was put that way, it just seems one possibility. There could be several others.