Archive: November, 2007

With the explosion of “Web 2.0″ websites, Google’s search quality team gave some timely insights as to how search engine spiders will have trouble dealing with page content presented using Ajax. Just like Flash and JavaScript, the spiders are unable to crawl any links and see any content displayed using Ajax. As always there is a straightforward solution to this problem.

As long as you provide a HTML alternative of the same content for the spiders, and non-JavaScript enabled browsers, then the search engines will not have a problem with your Ajax pages. This will also allow you to reach an audience who have accessibility issues, such as the visually impaired or those using mobile devices.

As part of our initial examination of a client site our SEOs turn off JavaScript whilst browsing or use the Lynx text only browser to determine if all of the content and links can be seen by the spiders. Although I find Lynx to be quite useful for browser accessibility issues, it does not give a true representation of how a search engine spider will see a web page. By not displaying linked images that have a blank or missing alt attribute, Lynx can give the mistaken impression that some links are not spiderable. To get the most realistic impression, there are many “Search Engine Spider Simulators” that will show the text content and links that are visible to a spider after all of the HTML and JavaScript is removed from the page source code.