SEO Step By Step Guide– 103. SEO and AJAX

Website owners love to add few bells and whistles to their website with AJAX applications. What is special about AJAX? Normally when we press the submit button in a webpage or make a selection and click ‘go’ in the websites, the page will refresh and reload based on the selections we made or the information that we requested. When we use AJAX to handle such actions, we can display the required results without having to refresh the page. If the page does not have to refresh means, we do not have to wait for long to get what we want. We can get the required information or move to the next step faster. This certainly improves the user experience several times. However, not many website owners realize that the AJAX applications that they incorporate have very poor SEO value and they even go against your SEO goals.

AJAX uses Java script and this is not good for SEO, as search engines cannot read Java script. Search engines turn a blind eye to all content delivered through AJAX. If you think that your navigation menu is fancy with AJAX, then you should be ready to accept the fact that it will not be seen or crawled by search engine spiders. Your website’s navigation menu is highly important for SEO reasons and for complete crawling and if such an important element is going to be working against you in terms of SEO, then you better start looking for an alternative option.

If you want to make your website search engine friendly, then better have every page of your website in HTML. You should be able to check whether your website is serving HTML pages by switching off the Java script in your web browser. You should not get any error messages even when the Java script is switched off.

Since AJAX uses an intermediary engine and does not refresh the page, the content delivered through AJAX does not correspond to the URL displayed. This indicates that this page cannot be reached by search engines. You will also not find any browser history for web pages delivered through AJAX. For now, not even Google can read AJAX delivered pages. We say not even Google because Google has one of the most powerful search algorithm and the most sophisticated indexing technology. If Google cannot do it, then we can be sure that no other search engine will be capable of indexing your AJAX pages.

However, it does not mean that you cannot use AJAX for your website but make sure that you have the right resources to handle it for you. There are number of ways you can handle the SEO related issues when you are using AJAX. One of the ways of handling the URL issue is to add # symbol when you get the page updated. You can use Java script to get this done. There are number of such ways of making your AJAX delivered pages search engine friendly.

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