On many blogs, SEO professionals say AJAX is evil in SEO, just in the same way Flash is. But ask a Web2.0 designer/developer, AJAX is so cool that people will love it and stay on your site seeing the quick interactive visual feedback without any page reloading. Let’s look deeper into the possibility of making SEO and AJAX BFF.
What is AJAX?
AJAX is a term coined publicly by Jesse James Garrett of AdaptivePath meaning: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. As posted on Wikipedia:
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), or Ajax, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The main intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.
AJAX is asynchronous in that extra data is requested from the server and loaded in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. JavaScript is the scripting language in which AJAX function calls are usually made. Data is retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object that is available to scripting languages run in modern browsers. There is, however, no requirement that the asynchronous content be formatted in XML.
AJAX is a cross-platform technique usable on many different operating systems, computer architectures, and web browsers as it is based on open standards such as JavaScript and the DOM. There are free and open source implementations of suitable frameworks and libraries.
Keeping the technical language to a minimum, the main observable benefit you have in running AJAX is having dynamic content load on your page without having the whole page to reload on a new URL. This gives you the benefit to only reload certain parts of a page making the resources load to a minimum aside from having it visually appealing to the user.
Problem 1: SEO Issues with Dynamic Content of AJAX
Search engines crawl websites using bots that are also called crawlers or spiders. These are nothing but programs that visit webpages on the Internet looking at all links and further visiting every valid link found crawlable. And content on the page is read and associated to the URL crawled. (more…)
