AJAX crawlability to be tackled by Google

For years the two major SEO don’t dos were building your site purely in Flash or using AJAX. Since major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google have received a sanctioned Flash reader from Adobe, they have both improved their results on reading SWF files. The next major battle is crawling AJAX websites.

Many website owners will have had the experience of Google indexing URLs that have only ever appeared in JavaScript so we know that there has always been some support, even though the message in the SEO community has always been that JavaScript is not crawlable.

For the less technical of us, the goals outlined in Google’s proposal for making AJAX crawlable are:

• 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

Let’s hope that there is more guidance on crawlability of AJAX than there is for Flash, otherwise many of you will be finding parts of your site that you genuinely do not wish to be crawled and indexed appear in search results.