Google Offers A Proposal To Make AJAX Crawlable
October 9th, 2009
A couple of days ago, Google announced a proposal to make AJAX crawlable.
From the Web Master Central:
This will benefit webmasters and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX-based websites universally accessible through search results on any search engine that chooses to take part. We believe that making this content available for crawling and indexing could significantly improve the web.
Google’s Stated Proposals Goal:
- 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
The Proposal: Making AJAX Crawlable (in short):
Full Proposal
Slightly modify the URL fragments for stateful AJAX pages
Adding a token to ajax url to make it possible to recognize stateful AJAX pages.
Use a headless browser that outputs an HTML snapshot on your web server
The headless browser would generate HTML code based on the final state on the page.
Allow search engine crawlers to access these URLs by escaping the state
Escaping the state and adding it to the query parameters with a token.
Show the original URL to users in the search results
This could be very interesting if Google goes to production with it. We’ll keep an eye on this to see what impact it will have for our client and the community.
