Hi everyone,

We've just published some tips on the Google Webmaster Central Blog
regarding Ajax and search engines. Have questions or tips of your own?
Share them right here.

And here's the link :-)
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/11/spiders-view-of-we...

On Nov 6, 5:43 pm, Wysz wrote:

Great!!!

I love the part about building the site for static structure and
navigation first and then adding AJAX coolness on top.

One thing that seems to be missing though, on pages that are navigated
to via hash/fragments, add a "permalink" link to that exact page minus
the hash/fragment.

It can be hard to make the permalink prominent enough so that people
notice it without having it in 30px bold text but I find putting a
dashed border underneath the word "permalink" with a question mark
cursor and explanatory tooltip displayed on mouseover helps.  If all
else fails though, you tried.  ;-)

But getting back to using a permalink, let's say you have a site with
a static page URL of www.example.com/coolness-personified/ that search
engines and non-Javascript clients access but which is accessed via
AJAX through www.example.com/#coolness-personified

In that example, a given user can bookmark the hash/fragment URL and
even send that URL to their friends and could even put that link on a
page of their site and everyone would be happy.

Everyone except search engines that wouldn't have a clue as to what to
do with the hash/fragment because the hash/fragment is not being used
in the way the standards had envisioned.

But, everyone, including search engines can make use of the static
permalink.

Also, if your static/AJAX navigation is implemented such that one
starts out with a static page, assuming a static URL is requested but
then all subsequent navigation/functionality is AJAX if Javascript is
enabled, they won't know the difference.  They follow a static link
but are automatically immersed in an AJAX environment.

On the other hand, if the client doesn't have Javascript enabled, they
just continue on with the static links and functionality.

This applies not only to navigation but on-page functionality as
well.  For example, font size switching. One can easily set up
Javascript to do it all on the client side but what happens if
Javascript is disabled?  Font sizing is no longer available. Also, if
it is all done in Javascript, one often finds pages first loading in
the default size and then flickering as they are rewritten to a
different font size.

Another option, an image editor.  Of course it would be tedious for an
image editing application to have to refresh the page after every
image editing function is executed but contrast that with no image
editing at all?  The hope is that by making things MUCH easier by
having Javascript enabled, more visitors will have Javascript enabled.

AJAX makes some things possible that without, would be impossible but
with every benefit, there is usually a cost.  The cost of AJAX though
need only be in extra preparation and consideration in the beginning
design phase but once set up and if done right, you can essentially
forget about it and just build your pages as you always do.

Craig

On Nov 7, 10:45 am, Wysz wrote:

Hi,

I am in the process of developing a site which will be developed using
GWT, due to the increase usability it will give to visitors and in
parallel I am creating a pure html/css version (with the same content)
within the <noscript> tags.

The html/css is to be used by robots and users with javascript disable
like mobile phone users.

In some groups/forums people say that text within <noscript> is
totally disregarded by robots.

How do you see the site being crawled successfully?

Thanks for the help.

Nuno

On Nov 7, 1:45 am, Wysz wrote:

Hi, good post. Just how far does Google go with this cloaking
business? What about sites that allow Googlebot to index them but when
a user shows up (after clicking the snippit from the search results)
the site requires registration, and no Google cache option. This is a
terrible user experience and breaks your guidelines. Wouldn't it be
better to sort this issue out by removing those sites first as an easy
fix? Other than that great advice.

Dave
http://www.easywebstore.co.uk/

On Nov 7, 1:43 am, Wysz wrote:

Detecting that type of cloaking likely has to be done manually, which
means a webmaster tools spam report might be helpful.

For a bot to detect it, the bot would have to lie and not say it is a
crawler.  ;-)

By the way, it is better to not post links to sites unrelated to the
discussion, unless you are using easywebstore as an example of the
type of cloaking you are talking about.  ;-)

Unrelated links are considered advertising and so are against the
Webmaster Help Charter.

It's a common enough mistake though so don't feel too badly about
it.  :-)

Besides, all links are nofollow'ed anyway and links without relevance
in this forum seem to get almost no traffic anyway so there really
isn't much benefit no matter how you look at it.

Craig

Hey would u be able to take a look at my site capecodlesiure.com. I
recently had page rank dropped from 2 to 0 just wondering why? Can u
give me some advise?

thx

On Nov 6, 8:43 pm, Wysz wrote:

Hello cape!  :-)
If you go to the main forum http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/topics?...
a scan of some of the thread subjects might help you find a thread on
a similar problem.  If not, you could create your own thread to try to
get help figuring out what happened.

I'll just say now that many site lost a bunch of green pixels in the
toolbar PageRank so you are not alone.  Most often though, if SERPs
positions and traffic haven't changed, it is most likely just a
cosmetic change but without taking a closer look, it is hard to tell.

In any event, check out some of the other threads in this "Crawling,
indexing, and ranking" forum and see what you find.

Craig

On Nov 8, 2:20 am, cape wrote:

I don't know about Google, but MSN does exactly that:

Host: 65.55.2**.***

/robots.txt
Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 10 16:07:56 Http Version:HTTP/1.0 Size in
Bytes: 196
Referer: -
Agent: msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)/binnengekomen_2005.html
Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 10 16:08:19 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in
Bytes: 14723
Referer: -
Agent: msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)

Host: 65.55.1**.***

/binnengekomen_2005.html
Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 10 16:09:03 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in
Bytes: 14723
Referer: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=dieren
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2)
/va.css
Http Code: 200 Date: Oct 10 16:09:03 Http Version: HTTP/1.0 Size in
Bytes: 4281
Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2)

On 7 nov, 15:34, cass-hacks wrote:

That's interesting!!

I've never seen anything like that, although I've never really looked
for sequences like that.

Cool, more access log diving!!!  :-()

Thanks for the info!

That said, if snooping is what MSN is actually doing, it wouldn't
surprise me.

Anyhoo, back to the discussion of Flash sites and making them search
engine and accessible friendly.  :-)

Craig

I think I've seen a few Javascript links crawled by Google.  Don't
have time to dig into logs, but I'm sure I've seen it.  I know they're
working on it... maybe its a beta-googlebot or something.

Then we're going to have another issue... When G-bot IS finally able
to crawl them, is it going to take in tons & tons of duplicate content
because we've re-written so many JS pages (at least my company has)
for non-JS users & search engines?

A time frame for this event would be pretty cool.

I have been thinking about this for the last few weeks. A friend of
mine showed me what her teacher called AJAX (which as I'm
understanding is more that what she was shown in class). Anyways what
she was shown is a really cool navigation (load other html pages into
a "content" div on the main page), but then I started thinking of how
google friendly that would be (as I wouldn't want google to return
results directly to the content html, that is not being displayed
inside the main page (that contains the navigaition).

The approach I've been considering is to use php and javascript, but
had not figured out exactly how that would work until reading the blog
post. Now I think I can make it fly. I've already got a decent html/
css/php site, but as it grows the html/css navigation gets cumbersome
to keep up to date. The AJAX approach should reduce that burden (from
a maintenance side) as well as less bandwidth and storage usage.
Should also make page loading quicker (since it will only load the
content and not all the navigation and layout css to re-render:)

Very good blog post, and most helpful, thank you.
Mike

On Nov 6, 6:43 pm, Wysz wrote: