Hi everyone, Next week at Search Engine Strategies in New York, Jim McFadyen (a colleague of mine at Critical Mass http://www.criticalmass.com) and I will be presenting a panel and discussion on using AJAX and the implications for search engine optimization. While we will be showing examples from some of the work we have done or have played a part in at Critical Mass, such as the newRolex.com and Mercedes-Benz USA (mbusa .com), I thought I'd check in with the people here in the SEO trenches and see what kind of things people are currently working on or enjoy. Do you know or like any sites that use AJAX but are still search engine friendly? In other words, if you turned off javascript and disabled flash, would you still get a working experience or would you be left out in the cold? Are you proud of a site that you have made that uses advanced javascript but still functions without it? Spread the word and let me know what you enjoy and respect. To start this conversation off, take a look at gap.com: first with javascript and flash and then without javascript or flash. If you don't have javascript enabled plus the latest version of flash, you can't browse the clothes or make a purchase. In fact, you see nothing but a warning message. Perhaps not the most usable of sites... --ryanj
It would be good if you could redirect a crawlers to your actual content without being penalized from engines. p.l.u.r.
Seems to me it would be pretty easy to have the entire site there and accessible from within the sitemap. After all its likely ran from within a database. Your problem would be making those pages (which nobody would go to) get some links too..
The sitemap is very important for sure - but you hit on a very important point, we would like to have inbound links for every page of the site...even if the site is mostly flash. In our presentation, Jim is going to explain how the rolex.com site uses javascript with the flash to create flash pages that are bookmarkable and can be jumped into without going through the whole website. A bit of 'magic' happens when the page is first loaded - if you don't have javascript or flash you get a text based page, if you have javascript and no flash you get text and graphics and finally if you have javascript and flash you get the page with the full audio/video experience. The talk gets into more details about duplicate content issues, etc. In the end, it works well and doesn't leave anyone out. --ryanj
Do you have a preview of how you are avoiding duplicate content with this model of essentially three different versions?
This sounds like a great presentation will it be available after the conference? If so I would be interested in viewing it.
Ryan, I've noticed a lot of misconceptions about AJAX and SEO. 2 of the biggest problems are: No content or navigation on initial page load. Lack of unique URL's. I wrote an article on AJAX and SEO you may want to check out: http://www.hybrid6.com/webgeek/2007/01/ajax-web-20-and-seo.php
I like your idea of letting people bookmark the pages within the site, that would be one way to start to bring links to internal pages. Still how would you get the deep links to even an ajax site?Also will you be posting your presentation somewhere that we can see it? Unfortunately I'm based in China and while my boss will pay for conferences within asia, ones in the states are a bit too far because of the air fare involved. I just attempted to go to this site and it failed
You may have triggered one of our web site's security measures. PM me your IP address and I'll check it out.