Google Proposes Crawlable AJAX

Posted Friday 9th October 2009 by Allison in SEO.

Google has just announced a new proposal for making AJAX-based websites crawlable. Currently, when AJAX is utilised, search engines cannot read and index the content of the applications which use AJAX. Now that Google proposes crawlable AJAX, this could all change.

AJAX, the acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is actually a group of web development techniques that merges content, data and design into a whole. It allows web applications to retrieve information from the server asynchronously without affecting the display of the current page.

In other Web applications, user and server interaction is synchronous. That is, one happens after the other. A customer clicks, this sends a request to the server, and then the server sends back the result. With AJAX websites, JavaScript is loaded and it handles many of the tasks like data validation and manipulation. It simultaneously makes display changes the user has requested, and sends data backwards and forwards to the server.

A good example of AJAX is Google Maps. You can scroll around the page looking at a map, and the page updates seamlessly without a lag and the appearance of reloading.

It’s revolutionised web services and done wonders for user experience, but previously, AJAX websites could not be accessed, and therefore not indexed, by search engines.

Make AJAX based websites crawlable

Google wants to make AJAX based websites crawlable because it says that more developers would be able to put richer features on to their sites and the sites would show up in search engines.

There’s no doubt that the searchability of AJAX-enabled web applications suffers. Seventy per cent of web content is created dynamically – of course this doesn’t mean that 70 per cent of web applications use AJAX, but a high percentage now do and undoubtedly more will follow.

This proposal would be great for web developers wanting to add many rich applications to their sites and have them indexed.

The problem for some, though, is that not everyone wants all of their AJAX content indexed; they would prefer for it to stay hidden, as it is of no relevance to users anyway. Also, if the content is so important that it must be indexed, why not put it behind its own unique permanent URL?

In Google’s proposal to make AJAX based websites crawlable it states there should be no cloaking; both search engines and users must see exactly the same content. But there is worry this could be a feature that spammers will exploit.

There is also the added overhead of the URL set up that have been proposed. Google has suggested URL setups for developers, but if these aren’t followed and executed exactly, it wouldn’t work properly, and this would reflect back on the site.

Google has also proposed that website owners implement a headless browser, with only specially-tagged URLs passing to it to be processed. Google says that by having the headless browser server-side, the site owner controls the HTML code generated and can verify JavaScript is executed in the right way.

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