Ajax applications and SEO

<>p>Rich McIver has written a piece on The best ways to incorporate the benefits of Ajax without making your site blind to search engines.

The article talks about how not to use cloaking, div layering, and instead:

Design your site with degradable AJAX, that way users with JavaScript disabled can view a working version of your website along with JavaScript enabled visitors.
After you’ve established a non-AJAX working version of your website, go back and include an alternative AJAX enhancements where you desire.
When designing, make sure to check your website with JavaScript disabled as well as through the eyes of a text only browser such as Lynx or SEO-Browser.
Perform a browser check to make sure the user has JavaScript enabled, that way you’re only serving AJAX pages to users that can view them.

What has been your experience with building SEO aware rich Ajax applications?

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Isn’t this just a list of basics?

If you want maximum reach your website needs to work without javascript, without style, without images and with accessible markup.

Comment by Gaz Elms — June 20, 2007

This is really “basics of web dev”
Using JavaScript in an unobtrusive way is first of all a design thing and SEO is a nice side effect. I agrre with Gaz Elms’s opinion regarding Rich McIver’s findings.

Comment by Andy Scherzinger — June 20, 2007

Why use a different webbrowser? Just choose “no style” in the submeny “page style” in the “view”-menu in Firefox – don’t know if that’s the exact words because my FF is swedish…

Comment by Pelle — June 20, 2007

It’s really basis of a nice web dev

Comment by Terry — June 20, 2007

Basic or no, It’s still good advise to get and to heed. I did some consulting work on a large web-based “Outlook” application, after the original devs had already got the major thrust of the site working. The application is completely dependent on Javascript, instead of simply being enhanced by it. Luckily it could be considered an “extranet” so some environment requirements could be imposed on the people using it, but it made me wonder how many developers who include Ajaxian techniques in their front -end do in fact take the time needed to plan the site out in “analog” first, before jumping into the scripting.

Comment by Mike Ritchie — June 22, 2007

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