Google Looking to Crawl AJAX in the Future
Posted: October 9th, 2009
At SMX East on Wednesday, Google set forth a proposal for crawling and indexing content that is dynamically created using AJAX. According to their research, as much as 70% of content on the web today is dynamically-generated (mostly through JavaScript), and this trend is only going to continue. So in an attempt to keep up with the times and make this type of content available to searchers, Google has proposed a standard that if adapted, would empower searchers, webmasters, and search engines alike.
The main goals are to have:
* Minimal changes are required as the website grows
* Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
* Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
* Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content
An effective way of making AJAX crawlable and easily indexed should in theory improve the experience of searchers, since more content (that could be more “interesting”) could be found in the index.
Here’s the official post regarding the proposal.
Crawlable AJAX code? Or the output?