|
AJAX and SEO: Hazards of AJAX to a Website's Search Engine Ranking
|
|
|
| 2.0/5.0 (4 votes total) |
|
|
|
Raja Sekharan May 09, 2007
|
Remember when users called the Internet the "world wide wait"? You
load a website, click on a link or press a button and wait, the whole
page disappears and reappears all over again and the only difference
between the two pages is an error message. Then you correct the mistake
and click, and wait, wait and finally done! Websites need to be
more responsive and more user-friendly. Website visitors are used to
seeing instantaneous responses to actions in standalone applications
like microsoft office etc., and it is only natural that they expect the
same behavior from web pages too. Recently, quite a few websites, such
as GMail and Google Maps, have addressed these issues by developing
AJAX type websites where the page mostly never unloads as a result of
user action, but only a particular section of the website is changed.
Since the whole contents of the page are not unloaded and downloaded
again, this type of development accounts for faster and more
interactive user experience. One can expect a few unexpected
results from an AJAX driven website too. Such as a particular URL may
over time display different content as a result of user action.
Bookmarking and navigating the browser history will turn up unexpected
results as the URL never changes but only the content. This is a major
problem for search engine indexing of such a page because the pages
that a particular link will lead to will never be indexed by Search
engines because javascript code is used to fetch the content of that
page at the same URL. Search engines cannot follow such links and
therefore will just skip such content. There are work-arounds for
this particular problem, but may not be compatible across multiple
browsers or may not suit the particular application. Thus AJAX may be
thought of as a Double edged sword in the hands of a developer. One
must keep SEO considerations at higher priority while designing
websites in AJAX.
|
|
|