From what I've read, AJAX and SEO don't go well together. I'm developing a website with ASP.NET with AJAX extenders. Here is my situation..... Basically, all of my pages in my site have a fixed-pixel and centered 1024px panel on each page. The reason I put a giant centered panel on my pages is because I wanted to use the rounded corners AJAX extender to make my pages look softer and nicer. This panel with rounded corners is on my master page, which all my other pages reference. Therefore, essentially all of my content on all my pages will be inside this giant rounded-corner panel. It seems that normally, AJAX is harmful for SEO indexability from what I've read. My question is - in what way exactly? Is it because A) the bots will not look inside any AJAX components and therefore not get past my big center panel (in which case, I guess the bots will probably pick up nearly nothing on my site lol) or B) people who implement AJAX, normally don't require the user to reload the entire page (or go to another page to minimize traffic) and therefore suffer from lack of unique pages and static content? If it is A, I definitely have a problem. But if B is true, then I think I would be ok. Most of my AJAX extenders are for eye-candy - like rounded-corners, validation callout, slideshow, confirm-button, etc. I don't use dynamic update panels to stream lots of new content that often, and most of my content is either hard-coded static content or the content is generated at initial page load (like when a page is called with a querystring parameter). Thanks in advance.
It's JavaScript - with the ability to interact with the server. The easiest way to test for SEO and AJAX is to turn off JavaScript in your browser. If the content is still there (or can be accessed the old fashioned way), then the search engines will have no problem getting to it.
Dan - thanks for your feedback. All of my pages (and the contents) are displayed on a giant 1024px centered panel, which is tied into a ASP.NET AJAX rounded-corners extender - like what I had mentioned before. I turned off active scripting (what it's called in the IE browser anyway) to disable javascript and tested my webpages like you suggested. After I had disabled scripting on the browser, all my pages are now on a normal panel (the default panel has square edges) and the rounded corners have disappeared. However, things within that giant panel (which is practically everything lol) have remained and I can read text with my eyes. Does this mean the bots can too? All of the other ASP.NET AJAX extender functionality are broken as well - confirm-button, photo slideshow, tab-pane - but I don't really mind since I don't generate much content with AJAX anyway. I just use it for a bit of eye-candy here and there. The crawlers are blind to aesthetics and only care about textual content, right? So, I guess the reason why people say AJAX and SEO don't mix is because of reason B in my original post? I'd say ASP.NET AJAX extenders are safe to use if done mainly for eye-candy and if most of your content doesn't come from update panels.