Has anyone else heard that Google has a new proposal out which would allow the indexing of AJAX sites? Well it’s about time. Here’s what I’ve been able to come with. The main problem that search engines have with AJAX is the generation of pages containing the # mark. Search engine spiders get confused because the same mark is use to denote anchors within the page, and so the whole thing gets ignored. This is just sad because AJAX can do some amazing things.
So what’s this new proposal? Well let’s look at it in steps:
1) The AJAX generated URL with the # mark is replaced by one with a #! mark.
2) When the #! mark is encountered by the search engine spider it requests the URL with a syntax that would replace the #! with ?_escaped_fragment_=
3) This ends up with the URL request being routed to a headless browser in order for a static page to be rendered.
As far as I can tell, the actual URL that visitors see will contain the #!, not the ?_escaped_fragment_=. Sound complicated? Undoubtedly it is and only dedicated AJAX users would have been able to wrap their heads around it. The point is that Google may now be able to index AJAX sites. The second point is that other search engines might not as yet. Something like this is bound to have a lot of bugs so it’s best to wait and see how things go before fiddling around with your site and trying to change your URLs.
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