Next Step in Search: Making AJAX Crawlable
Posted by jonathan at 10:42am EST on 10/09/2009
A large problem with new technologies, or even old technologies like Flash, is that there may be complications with how Googlebot crawls. This has been a huge problem with AJAX, which was introduced by Microsoft back in 1999 (then called XMLHTTP ActiveX control), but popularized by Google’s release of Gmail back in 2004.
Google is making headway on making AJAX content and applications crawlable. This is a huge step for Google and its search engine as for the other engines, this is still a difficult feat.
Google has a list of proposal ideas. Here is the short list of ideas.
- Slightly modify the URL fragments for stateful AJAX pages
- Use a headless browser that outputs an HTML snapshot on your web server
- Allow search engine crawlers to access these URLs by escaping the state
- Show the original URL to users in the search results
Here are some slides which they have provided with their post.
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Dataflurry
Nov 2nd, 2009
IMO, the programmers that create programming languages should create a language that is crawl-able to make it a well rounded application. However, I am glad to see that Google is making headway with this. Of course, certain languages such as Flash don’t have this capability because of the visual nature of the application, however I think Ajax could have been engineered to be more search friendly.