AJAX Content May Soon Become Crawlable by Google

Lee Zoumas - October 19, 2009

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about the inability for search engines to crawl some AJAX-driven content. This is due to AJAX’s reliance on JavaScript, which is mostly ignored by search engines. Recently, Google has proposed a new standard for making AJAX content crawlable by search engines. This is exciting news because webmasters who were not able to utilize some of the cool features of AJAX, for fear of poor SEO results, will now be able to offer a richer user experience without sacrificing their search engine rankings.

It seems that this will not be an automatic process, but will require web developers to tweak their applications slightly, so they are in accordance with the new standards that Google is proposing. However, Google is hoping that this will be possible with minimal modifications to existing AJAX-based applications. Although Google has not specifically stated how web developers will know if their modifications are correct or not, they do mention that there will be a way to verify what parts of your AJAX-driven content are crawlable, perhaps through Google Webmaster Tools?

Although this proposal and implementation are still in its infancy, it has been a long time coming in my opinion. This will no doubt make the web a better place. Let’s hope that other search engines will soon follow suit.