AJAX SEO Soon to be more Effective?

Google today announced plans to make websites which are AJAX-based crawlable and therefore accessible through search engine results. Even though AJAX-based websites can be very popular with visitors due to their rich features, most search engines cannot access any of their content and therefore they are not seen on the results pages of user searches.

With Google anticipating about 70% of websites use JavaScript, the news will allow more and more websites to incorporate AJAX into their content, enhancing visitor experience without the fear of becoming hidden from Google spiders. With this is mind, websites which have previously had no reason to be conscious of SEO practices will soon be able to influence their rank. AJAX SEO could therefore soon be a much more effective marketing technique than previously thought.

In brief, Google is proposing a set of goals which will allow the least amount of change on behalf of the webmasters, while allowing search engines to direct users straight to the AJAX URL. The plans should also give webmasters the ability to verify whether or not their content is accessible by search engines.

The way in which search engines will be able to crawl AJAX-based websites if the proposal goes ahead can be explained in four stages:

- Webmasters modifying their current URL’s to include a token which will make it visible to search engines.
- Using a headless browser to access the AJAX content and producing HTML code based on the browsers final state.
- Escaping the state using another token within the URL, and thus allowing search engine spiders to access the URL’s.
- Making this URL visible to users in the search engines results.

AJAX SEO is something which up until now would have been mostly disregarded for ranking purposes, but with Google’s proposals, we could soon see a lot richer AJAX content on websites across the net. However as an experienced SEM agency we’ve heard this kind of announcement before from Google, with limited results. We therefore wait tentatively to see what materialises in the near future…

For more detailed information visit googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

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