October 8th, 2009
Google suggests making Ajax content crawlable
A posting on the Google blog proposes that asynchronous assets should be included in their index.
Boatloads of content on the web is accessed via Ajax including Google Maps and Facebook Photos.
While AJAX-based websites are popular with users, search engines traditionally are not able to access any of the content on them. The last time we checked, almost 70% of the websites we know about use JavaScript in some form or another. Of course, most of that JavaScript is not AJAX, but the better that search engines could crawl and index AJAX, the more that developers could add richer features to their websites and still show up in search engines.
I think this is a sweet idea, but the user should never notice a difference while using Google; that will be the challenge. More discussion on Techmeme.
Andrew Mager is a web developer at Ning, Inc. in Palo Alto. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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