My Question is: Why don't use more webpages AJAX to load the Webpage content?
Because of the fact that you can switch off JS or is there a thought about some security problem ?
Probably for two reasons:
Users with Javascript disabled won't see anything.
Pages loaded through AJAX aren't crawl-able by search engines. You want your content to be as accessible as possible so people searching the Web will find your application.
Because in most cases it doesn't make the site any more comfortable to use (often the effect would be the opposite). "Ajax" shouldn't be used to load entire pages unless you have a very good reason for it.
One word: SEO. Seach engines execute no javascript -> do not se the content -> do not index the page.
Related
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.
I've created an AJAX enabled web application. In my application all contents [that I want to be appear in search pages] are loaded using AJAX. However I observed that despite of valid sitemap submitted to google, my page raking is very very poor.
What all I need to do and what to avoid in order to improve page ranking.
Thanks in advance.
you probably want to make it enabled for bookmark and history. There are many ways. One of them is jQuery's history plugin: https://github.com/tkyk/jquery-history-plugin
you probably want to create a page for search engines to crawl your website with those links http://www.mysite.com/foobar.php#!fetch_content=xyz. The #! is a way recognized by Google to crawl and index its content.
reference: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/11/spiders-view-of-web-20.html
Don'ts would be interesting. But here's a do, for all of JS as well.
Make sure that all links degrade gracefully, this can be easily achieved by giving the links real URLs that lead to the same content that is to be loaded in the event that JS is not enabled. This makes crawling your website possible.
You would also have to disable default for all the affected links.
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/
Is there any way to allow search engines to list JSON or XML ajax data ?
I don't think there is a way to directly allow crawlers to index XML and JSON.
I would recommend trying to design your site using progressive enhancement. First, make all of the JSON and XML available in HTML form for users who don't use javascript. These users include some people with disabilities and the crawlers used by search engines. That will ensure your content is searchable.
Once you have that working and tested, add your ajax functionality. You might do this by serving HTML, XML and JSON from a single URL using content negotiation, or you might have seperate URLs.
Another graceful solution is to implement your ajax calls as requests to full HTML pages and have your javascript only use the bit that it's interested in e.g. a div with id "content. The suitability of this solution would depend on your exact requirements.
Hmm, no, not really. Search engines crawl your HTML and they don't really bother clicking around or even just loading your page into a browser and having the AJAX magic happen. Flash and JSON objects are by themselves invisible to search engines, and to get them visible, you have to transform them in some HTML.
The newest technique for getting AJAX requests to be listed in search engines is to ensure they have their own URL. This technique stems from the same one utilized by flash applications where each page has a unique identifier, preceded by a pound (#) sign.
There are currently a few jQuery plugins which will allow you to manage this:
SWFAddress - Deep Linking for Flash & AJAX
jQuery History Plugin
We're coming from GWT projects and because of problems with SEO not liking GWT for our next project we're going to move clear of GWT (mainly because seo is a high priority for this next project). In choosing a new framework, I'm looking at Wicket and liking what I've seen so far. I've only done a few tutorials, but in looking at the war layout (from these tutorials) it looks like most of the html pages are in the WEB-INF folder.
It this going to cause problems for SEO and search engines crawling through the sites files?
Ideally, I'd like to use Wicket with some AJAX and deploy to Google App Engine.
It does not matter if your .jsps (or whatever) are stored in /WEB-INF. It just means they cannot be accessed directly by going to http://webapp/path/to/jsp.
For SEO think about:
Meaningful URLs and link text (i.e. URLs should be similar to expected search engine queries)
Crawlable pages (make sure all your content can be reached by a non-JS enabled bot... i.e. don't make content only available through AJAX, for instance). A sitemap might help
Look into Wicket's Bookmarkable page links and UrlCodingStrategies for a very powerful combination to use in SEO. Basicly all your links and parameters can be encoded as/a/static/url, regardless of (changing) implementation on the backend.
if you project SEO is really important than you might reconsider using a lot of ajax since crawler wont execute javascript they are not gonna read all the return of your ajax calls... that being said the SEO quality of your site is not really based on the framework you will be using ... jsut always think about img alts, links, meta, title, h1 ... in every pages and you should be fine ... also always try to post links to your site on other websites to gain visibility and get importance for crawlers