full ajax site and SEO

Question

i am planing to start a full ajax site project, and i was wondering about SEO.

The site will have urls like www.mysite.gr/#/category1 etc

Can Google crawl the site.

Is something that i have to noticed about full ajax and SEO

Any reading suggestions are welcome

Thanks

Botticelli

Answer 1

I don't think Google is capable of doing so (yet) http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html

However you can of course make your site usable with or without JavaScript. That way, browsers will have the full candy stuff and Google (and text browsers) still can navigation your site.

Ricardo

This is no longer true. See code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html – Sogdian

Here's an updated url to Willster's solution in case Google kills the redirect: developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/… – Mitziemitzl

Answer 2

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/768233/do-hashes-in-urls-affect-seo

You might want to read about so called progressive enhancement.

Fructification

If you think it's a duplicate, vote to close, don't post the link as an answer. If you don't think it's a duplicate, then this doesn't answer the question, and should be a comment. – Southward

@Dominic more seriously - it's just a common practice for me to provide my answer gradually. :) – Fructification

Answer 3

Google supports indexing of AJAX sites, but unfortunately it involves extra work for the developer. See http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html

Biplane

Answer 4

In addition to SEO, you also need to think about usability standards here. A site that is that reliant on AJAX isn't going to work for things like screen-readers as well as spiders. You need a system for graceful degreadation. A website that can't function without JavaScript isn't really a functioning website.

Hawkshaw

Answer 5

The search engines will spider the initial page load - what happens to the page (with ajax) after that is irrelevant to listings.

Unbar

Answer 6

Google itself doesn't crawl ajax content but advice a mechanism for it. For this you first need to change # to #!

Whole process to SEO AJAX content is explained here along with simple asp.net code to start working on it.

Belfry

Answer 7

Imagine having to hit the “refresh” button in your browser to update your Twitter feed rather than just hitting the button on the page itself and having it instantly update? These are the types of problems that AJAX solves, although it does come with its pitfalls. Google might claim it’s able to crawl and parse AJAX websites, yet it’s risky to just take its word for it and leave your website’s organic traffic up to chance. Even though Google can usually index dynamic AJAX content, it’s not always that simple. This guide covers some of the things that can go wrong and how you can make sure your AJAX website is crawlable: https://prerender.io/ajax-seo/

Mercymerdith