I have always heard that SE's like to crawl lots and lots of nice content. So I was thinking if say my site has AJAX then is it good from SEO point of view. I stay only on one page. AJAX handles the requests. Just asking for some opinions. Thanks.
It technically has no influence on SEO. Only when you make bad design decisions, like showing no content unless an onclick event is done. So it depends on how you use it. It would be stupid to run a forum without any new pageloads, but showing a little loginn form onclick like on Digg has no effect on SEO, the form wasn't usefull for the spider's evaluation anyway. Tehre are many articles on AJAX do's and don'ts. Might want to Google them.
Humm.... Right. Will have to figure it out. Bcoz if SE's gets article after article on the same index.php page then i will only have one page indexed in SE.
I'd disagree and say AJAX is disasterous for SEO unless you handle it carefully. For example, Google et al will see nothing beyond your first page content if you solely use AJAX to update the page. And they won't even see your first page if you generate the content after the fact using AJAX. Progressive enhancement is the way to go if you need good SEO - in other words, if javascript support is not enabled, the site falls back to traditional page requests to deliver the new content.
That's what I meant, CCD. I meant that if Google sees you use AJAX, it won't penalize you per se. Only if you have very poor implementation and indeed make AJAX events a requirement for certain content to show, that's when you'll definitely get in trouble. You make a good point of fall backs. If you test your site with really tight securiuty settings, JS/Java off etc. then it should still work and be navigable.
I think AJAX is fine from a SEO point of view, you just don't want to overdue it. Lots of popular sites have little AJAX forms throughout the site, but what you will notice, is these forms do not prevent you from actually accessing the content. As long as you are keeping the content indexable, then I would say use AJAX as much as you want... Tom
If you're only using one page to display all of your content, and using ajax, I think your heading down a long bumpy road. If however you use the one page, and that page loads with unique versions of the url for the different content, then it will allow for the different versions of the page to be indexed. The point of ajax is to avoid repeated and/or uneccessary page loads, and to provide a more user friendly interface for users. Even for them... javascript... I would have a look at yahoo's new page. Perfect implementation of ajax for the web 2.0 wave. I would check for user/capabilities and make sure they will be able to view all of your content, otherwise, redirect them to a version they can use. Hope that helps. Good luck!
Okay. Great I had to find somethings to read about this. and here it is if someone else also wants to read it. http://swik.net/Ajax/Places+To+Use+Ajax
Using AJAX to display content is a very bad idea. Using it for forms or to register votes and cookies is fine. Obviously if you run CPM adverts you may want to remove AJAX from your site.
Ajax certainly not seo friendly but user friendly. you need to make a choice what to prefer and balance it.