Ajax and SEO

Are Ajax sites completely accessible to search engine spiders?

[kshitija chavan]

Hi All,

I have recently started working on an Ajax driven site. At the very initial stage I was very nervous about 'how do i try to rank for this site on Google, when the search spiders cannot crawl its content'.

This was a low down. However, this was my savior (pheeew): [developers.google.com...]


Has anyone had any experiences with Ajax sites? Please share your story.

[kshitija chavan]

Hey anyone out there? Does anyone have a reply to the above question?

[daveVk]

The savior potentially involves a lot of extra work, depending on what technology you are using etc, as you have to generate plain HTML for the bots, it may be easier to generate plain HTML for all.

For areas you don't what crawled Ajax shines, for example filtered results where there are infinite combinations.

[kshitija chavan]

Agreed. One thing to be mentioned is that since you need to create an HTML snapshot for each of your pages from your server, need to filter out bot traffic from Google Analytics. Otherwise you will see inflated traffic data.

[whoisgregg]

I've never built a site that depended on the hashbang (#!) solution. If I did, it would only be a personal site and not for a client/employer. It's much better in my opinion to use progressive enhancement to add AJAX functionality on top of a functioning, well-linked site structure.