Google offered their experience and support to make AJAX sites easy to crawl for search engines.
In a nutshell, AJAX is a relatively young technology the allows portions of the page to be updated without refreshing the whole page making the browsing experience faster and more enjoyable. The technology that makes this possible has been around for long time (raise your hand if you never heard of JavaSrcipt before…), but the technique is quite recent (4~5 years). AJAX is cross platform and it has been quickly supported by the major development environments and browsers, therefore the development community adopted it pretty soon and we have been experiencing the result on a daily base since its adoption: google chat, gmail, web msn and other services implemented it.
The root of the problem: when it comes to interactive content, advanced features such as site searches (google suggest and asp.net popup results are among my favorites), booking engines and other interactive tools, a minimal part of the content is displayed to the user, but the rest of it is hidden and, most important, a user cannot save a direct link to the final result. The web crawlers used by search engines mimic the user interaction with the website prior to saving the result of their queries to a database.
What happens then with AJAX websites? search engines only parse part of the content and cannot provide a direct link to the source to be returned for later use. As stated on the Google blog:
“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.”
Here comes the cavalry: Google, in the name of the Web and clearly forseeing profit for boths parties (search engine industry and users), offered their support to the development community by writing a proposal with recommendations for a new standard that would make AJAX controls easy to crawl and would add support to permanent links within AJAX powered pages.The following are few key elements in it (from Google blog):
- Minimal changes are required as the website grows
- Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
- Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
- Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content
This idea sounds like a win-win-win-win to me! I could make even cooler websites (enjoying even more what I already enjoy working on) and, at the same time, my boss wouldn’t be worried about the learning curve for this technology (reduced expenses for better results), the clients would be happy about their ranking results (more profit) and, most important, the users would have an easier access to the information on the site (improved usability).
Hopefully (and almost probably) this proposal will be seriously considered by the involved parties and all going well we’ll see this standard implemented in few months… I’ll keep an eye on this proposal and I’ll write something about it as soon as there will be news, so keep an eye on our blog if you are interested to know how it evolves!
