Optimize AJAX pages for Search Engines
Its an established fact that an Ajax page is much easier to handle for the webmasters & much fruitful to their readers. Google instructs webmasters to design their pages keeping their readers in mind. But they themselves fails to help us. Because of their bots’ inability to understand the AJAX pages as they are to the flash & Jscript contents.
So that means if you are using AJAX improperly you are not going to rank good even if you are creating Quality posts.
So what to Do now ?? AJAX or HTML ?? Where one offers better user experience the other offers a good search rank. And both of them sucking at each others qualities.
Now as per Google, the problem with AJAX is with hyper linking and On-page content. So if AJAX pages are implemented carefully this misery can be solved.
A new technology labeled as Hijax(by Jeremy Keith) will help you out of this problem. This technique combines two links in one single piece of code.
- Build your blog’s navigation and structures only using HTML.
- Now that you have the content & links, make the interface better with AJAX. Now bots will be get there share of HTML while readers will enjoy the AJAX beauty.
- Now if you may have links needing Javascript for AJAX functionality, here’s how HIJAX solves it. Format the links as below :
<a href=”ajax.htm?foo=32” onClick=”navigate(‘ajax.html#foo=32′); return false”>foo 32</a>
Now the parameter ?foo=32(instead of the fragment #foo=32) in the static link’s URL is used by AJAX code. This helps the search engines to understand the URL as it takes parameters into count and ignores fragments. And as you use both kinds of links readers & spiders can easily get what they deserve.
Want to see how Googlebot sees your site ?? Use browser like Lynx or simply turn off the JavaScript of your browser & then browse your site.
Hope you found it useful. Optimized your pages? Share with us! Happy Blogging!!
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When it comes to Ajax there are unfortunately a lot of people misusing it by creating whole sites without any pageloads. By doing so it becomes impossible to link to specific pages. Almost like Flash a few years ago.
Yes that’s true…Thanks for sharing your thoughts here dude..
great thanks and creative post
Thanks for your comments dude..
Looks like a good option for SEO, need to try this out on one of my sites that uses extensive Ajax for content
Great to see you here Keith…
Ajax is client side scripting [Based on JS]! So personally I think the usage should be kept minimum! The solution you are talking about is going to take double effort! Actually there are something which needs plain HTML, for example, like in WP blogs, it is Recent post, related post etc… Even some third party links [like twitter] can be processed through the xml api using cURL and that method should be primary!
But on the other hand, in some platforms like blogger, we can just forget about taking the advantage of the server side scripting! So why should not we use AJAX where ever applicable to make things better?? Because in both the cases [AJAX or just simple JS or iframe] we are not going to get the SEO juice! So for that I prefer using AJAX only!
But still using classical style page loading should be preferable!
Wow! Jeremy Keith, you are such a genius.
But anyway, thank you for sharing the information. I am not familiar how Ajax works but it is very useful if we know how to apply in our blog.
I only knew the basic of HTML and CSS… hehehee