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.
> 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.
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. ;-)
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.
> > 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.
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?
> > 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.- Hide quoted text -
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.
> 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.
> Wouldn't it be > better to sort this issue out by removing those sites first as an easy > fix? Other than that great advice.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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:
> > 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.
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?
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
> 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.