Articles in The 'AJAX' Tag

Updates May Be Required For Websites Using AJAX

by Priti Shah

Up until the past two years, Google had difficulty deciphering or rendering webpages that rely heavily on JavaScript. This often lead to content that was unreadable by search engines and users. Due to this, in 2009 Google proposed webmaster guidelines so that AJAX based applications would be visible and properly indexed by search engines and appear in search results for users.

It is important to understand that websites that are entirely built in AJAX (or rely heavily upon the technology) are usually more difficult for search engines to crawl and index correctly. However, Google has been making many strides in this realm indicating that there may be light at the end of the tunnel for websites that want to make stronger use of AJAX. Read on to learn more about how you can ensure that an AJAX application is up to date with Googles latest guidelines.Read More

Overuse of AJAX may have Negative SEO Implications

by Lee Zoumas

The constant buzz about Web 2.0 technologies, might lead one to believe that all Web 2.0 technologies are well suited for ideal search engine optimization. That’s not entirely true. One such technology that comes to mind is AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). As you browse the web these days, you will no doubt encounter many web sites implementing AJAX technologies. AJAX is basically a set of web technologies, based on JavaScript, that allow parts of a web page to communicate with the web server without refreshing the entire webpage as a whole. The end goal is to allow web applications to behave more like traditional desktop applications. Although AJAX can be used for many other things, that is what is was designed for, and in my opinion, what it is best at.

Since AJAX is based on JavaScript, you should be aware that like JavaScript, AJAX and most search engines don’t play well together. This means that you need to consider whether or not AJAX is the right solution for your needs. Consider this issue that we faced not too long ago. We have a client who wanted to display tabular data. When you clicked on a tab, corresponding information would be loaded into the panel below. There are many common ways to achieve this using AJAX, but the thing is, the search engines are only seeing whichever panel of information is displayed when the web page is initially loaded. With this kind of solution, when a tab is clicked, a request is made to the server and the data is returned just to that panel, without refreshing the entire webpage. So if you have 5 tabs, only the first one will be indexed, and the other 4 will not. A spider will not execute the JavaScript call that loads the information for the other tabs, so, that content you wanted to get indexed, well, just won’t.

We realized that AJAX was not the best solution for displaying tabular data and explored another search engine friendly alternative, JQuery, which proved to have better SEO results. I am by no means slamming AJAX. I actually love and use it all the time, but I don’t think it’s applicable in every situation. You should not choose to implement a technology because it is a buzzword. But rather, make sure you are using the right tool for the job.

If Only AJAX Were SEO Friendly, Or Is It?

by MoreVisibility

AJAX allows a developer to query a local or remote data source and render that content right to the browser without refreshing or reloading the page. This gives the user a much more responsive experience, if you have ever used Google Maps or the new web apps like Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets beta, you will no doubt understand the power of this wonderful technology. Now with all the new AJAX toolkits out there it is easier then ever to dive in and use this technology in your web projects. Expect to see it in use very often in the coming years.

Recently I tried to find any information I could regarding SEO and AJAX. I have had much fun playing with it in the past and wanted get back into it, but this time I am questioning it from a SEO perspective. I have yet to find a good reliable solution to get AJAX content indexed.

Even though I love AJAX, It has one MAJOR downfall. In a typical AJAX application the “meat” of the content is in javascript which means that search engines will never get to see that content you have put so much time into making. One way around this that I know of would be to create a plain HTML version of your content just for the search engines or those without browsers that support javascript, but this is not ideal by any means.

Until search engines are able to parse content out of javascript I would stay away from using AJAX for anything that involves content you would want indexed. For now I guess AJAX is still in the same boat as Flash. I will continue to look more into this topic, If anyone has any ideas please comment.