I am doing some ajax page with jQuery, can you tell me which are the differences (especially for SEO point of view) between pages like:
page.html#option1
page.html#!option1
Edit: mh maybe the second options is google-friendly
Thanks
You should use #! if you want your site crawlable by Google. More information is found on their Getting Started guide. So yes, the second version is more SEO-friendly. Another post worth reading is Googles propsal for making ajax pages crawlable.
However, for a users point of view, there's no difference.
Just a tip, sammy.js is a great library for working with this. It allows you to define routes using hash fragments.
Related
I am trying to create a one-page WordPress website, something like the ones you sometimes see in ThemeForest's WP section: the whole website is a long page that has everything in one place, from about us, to portfolio, to some blog posts, to contacts.
Placing all things on one page is not difficult. But when I started thinking about how to present individual posts and pages, I realised that I probably need a general way of getting posts' data via AJAX, and create new blocks with JS. How should I go about this? I suppose this was done before, but I struggle to find something this specific on Codex or a tutorial with best practices.
Any advice or link will be greatly appreciated.
You could use a plugin such as jQuery Easytabs, download it here, that has a built-in Ajax component.
I've found that the easiest way is to just get all content to load into the divs ahead of time, vs. trying to load all pages through Ajax. However, appending something like '?ajax/ajax' to the end of your urls through the Easytabs plugin is one option that I have successfully used in the past.
If you decide to use the easytabs functionality, there is ample documentation on the page that I linked to.
We have web applications elgifto.com, roadbrake.com in which we used AJAX at many places, especially to update major portions of a page. All the important functionality of elgifto.com was implemented using AJAX. Now we realize a few issues due to AJAX implementation.
All the content implemented using
AJAX is not available to the SEO
bots and it is hurting the page rank
of our site.
Users will not be able to bookmark
some of the pages as they are always
available through AJAX.
When we want to direct the user from
one page through an anchor link to
another page having AJAX, we find it
difficult.
So now we are thinking of removing AJAX for these pages and use it only for small functionality such as something similar to marking a question as favorite in SO. So before going ahead and removing, we want to know expert's opinion on this. Thanks.
The problem is not "AJAX" per se, but your implementation of it. Just as a for instance, you can fix the 'bookmark' problem like google maps does it: provide a generated link for each state of your webapp.
SEO can befixed by supplying various of these state-links to the crawlers, either organically trough links in your site, or by supplying a list (sitemap).
If you implement 2, you can fix 1 and 3 with those links.
In the end you must figure out if the effort is worth it, and if you are not overusing AJAX ofcourse, but the statements you've made are not set in stone at all.
I'm costantly developing ajax based websites, with no problems for SEO at all. You just have to use it in the best possible way.
For example, I have a website with normal links pointing to normal webpages (PHP pages), this for normal navigation if a user doesn't have JS enabled. But if a user has JS enabled, a script will change the links behavior, only fetching the content of the page needed.
This way you still have phisycal separated webpages with all their content, which will be indexed as normal.
How does Facebook Ajax work? 2-3 months ago they were using # but now the whole addressbar is changing.
The first approach used is called "Ajax Crawling" (also refer to this answer).
But I think the new approach you are talking about is just the HTML5 History API. Github is using this approach for their tree browsing, and you can learn more about it here. (I recommend ALL readers to read and watch the video as it's very informative)
EDIT:
Just to point out that Facebook is definitely using the HTML5 History API (direct link from the previous github article).
They still use # as far as I can tell (but maybe we are on different versions?). For me, their links are for different pages, but they intercept my onclick and change the click to an Ajax request instead. Maybe this is to make cleaner URLs when copying and/or make it work without JS?
I am currently trying to full appreciate how and when to use hash tags in urls when building an ajax powered website. There seems to be a distinct lack of reading material on the web regarding this technique and as such I don't feel like I've got a good handle on it.
Could someone explain in the simplest terms how the hash tag can be used in urls to enable things like loading pages via ajax.
Thanks
You might want to take a look at Google's Making AJAX Applications Crawlable website.
i am planing to start a full ajax site project, and i was wondering about SEO.
The site will have urls like www.mysite.gr/#/category1 etc
Can Google crawl the site.
Is something that i have to noticed about full ajax and SEO
Any reading suggestions are welcome
Thanks
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/768233/do-hashes-in-urls-affect-seo
You might want to read about so called progressive enhancement.
Google supports indexing of AJAX sites, but unfortunately it involves extra work for the developer. See http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html
I don't think Google is capable of doing so (yet)
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html
However you can of course make your site usable with or without JavaScript. That way, browsers will have the full candy stuff and Google (and text browsers) still can navigation your site.
In addition to SEO, you also need to think about usability standards here. A site that is that reliant on AJAX isn't going to work for things like screen-readers as well as spiders. You need a system for graceful degreadation. A website that can't function without JavaScript isn't really a functioning website.
The search engines will spider the initial page load - what happens to the page (with ajax) after that is irrelevant to listings.
Google itself doesn't crawl ajax content but advice a mechanism for it. For this you first need to change # to #!
Whole process to SEO AJAX content is explained here along with simple asp.net code to start working on it.
Imagine having to hit the “refresh” button in your browser to update your Twitter feed rather than just hitting the button on the page itself and having it instantly update? These are the types of problems that AJAX solves, although it does come with its pitfalls. Google might claim it’s able to crawl and parse AJAX websites, yet it’s risky to just take its word for it and leave your website’s organic traffic up to chance. Even though Google can usually index dynamic AJAX content, it’s not always that simple. This guide covers some of the things that can go wrong and how you can make sure your AJAX website is crawlable: https://prerender.io/ajax-seo/