GWT and Search Engine indexing

[JeanV]

I have searched and only found one old thread discussing how to allow
a GWT-based site to be indexed by search engines. Basically the
solution involved a convoluted way of creating 2 different sites.

You would think that Google would develop a toolkit that is compatible
with its search engine. Why would anyone develop a site using GWT if
it cannot be indexed by search engines?

Has any progress been made on this front? Any feedback would be highly
appreciated.

Regards,

Jean

[Isaac Truett]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 12:24 PM, JeanV <jve...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have searched and only found one old thread discussing how to allow
> a GWT-based site to be indexed by search engines. Basically the
> solution involved a convoluted way of creating 2 different sites.
>

There's been plenty of previous discussion on this topic. I'm sure you
can turn up more with further searching.

> You would think that Google would develop a toolkit that is compatible
> with its search engine. Why would anyone develop a site using GWT if
> it cannot be indexed by search engines?
>

Because I don't care -- nay, don't want -- my site to be indexed by
search engines?

> Has any progress been made on this front? Any feedback would be highly
> appreciated.
>

Yes, people are doing it. Ian Bambury has a GWT example site written
in GWT that is SE-friendly. That's where I would start if I were going
to build an indexed web site.

http://examples.roughian.com/#Home

- Isaac

> Regards,
>
> Jean
> >
>

[JeanV]

Maybe you don't care about your site being indexed by I bet you the
majority of people do.

I've seen Ian's example and he has done a great job but it should not
be that complicated. Any comments from the GWT folks?

[Isaac Truett]

You're barking up the wrong tree here. GWT is for writing
AJAX/RIA/whatever-you-want-to-call-them applications. It makes the
obnoxious JS bits tolerable. JS applications are inherently unfriendly
to search engines. You can overcome that (as Ian has done) but it
isn't going to be as simple as tossing an HTML file on some random web
server and having it indexed.

[jbdhl]

The GWT developer guide should definitely contain a section about
this:

1) How can GWT-applications be made search engine friendly?
2) How can GWT-applications be made ADSense friendly?

[Sumit Chandel]

Hello everyone,

For the time being, there isn't anything that GWT can do to especially address the search indexing problem for Ajax applications. This is a problem inherent to how Ajax works versus current search engine capabilities in crawling and indexing web content.

That said, Ian's solution is a good workaround while both search engines and Ajax application toolkits find ways to get around and solve the crawl problem.

I agree that having answers to questions like how GWT can be made search engine / AdSense friendly are important questions to answer. Perhaps we can look into trying to formalize some of the methods already discussed on the forum into FAQs or articles. I'll take a look at what we can do to improve here.

Cheers,

-Sumit Chandel

[parvez....@gmail.com]

Is there any progress on this subject?

On Oct 10, 5:07 pm, "Sumit Chandel" <sumitchan...@google.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> For the time being, there isn't anything that GWT can do to especially
> address the search indexing problem for Ajax applications. This is a problem
> inherent to how Ajax works versus current search engine capabilities in
> crawling and indexing web content.
>
> That said, Ian's solution is a good workaround while both search engines and
> Ajax application toolkits find ways to get around and solve the crawl
> problem.
>
> I agree that having answers to questions like how GWT can be made search
> engine / AdSense friendly are important questions to answer. Perhaps we can
> look into trying to formalize some of the methods already discussed on the
> forum into FAQs or articles. I'll take a look at what we can do to improve
> here.
>
> Cheers,
> -Sumit Chandel
>