Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
Ajax applications and SEO
Category: Articles
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?
3.5 rating from 22 votes
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.
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.
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…
It’s really basis of a nice web dev
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.