AJAX and SEO
-
Hello team,
Need to bounce a question off the group. We have a site that uses the .NET AJAX tool kit to toggle tabs on a page. Each tab has content and the content is drawn on page load. In other words, the content is not from an AJAX call, it is there from the start. The content sits in DIV tags which the javascript toggles - that's all.
My customer hired an "SEO Expert" who is telling them that this content is invisible to search engines. I strongly disagree and we're trying to come to a conclusion. I understand that content rendered async via an AJAX call would not be spidered, however just using the AJAX (Javascript) to switch tabs will not affect the spiders finding the content in the markup.
Any thoughts?
-
You are spot on, all you are doing to hiding and showing, if you can see it with fetch as googlebot you have no problems.
-
All - thank you so much for your help and validation of what I assumed. I've been doing this for about 17 years too and when this guy threw this over the fence at me on a conference call I was confused. Then the client freaked out, etc.
Oleg - using a similar example I copied some content from the site in question directly into the Google search just like you did with facebook.com and there it was. Indexed, plain as day.
-
Your "SEO Expert" is wrong and the content is indexed. This is most notable in FAQs... clicking on the question drops down the previously invisible div with the FAQ answer. Both the question and answer is indexed by search.
Here is an example... searched phrase is in an invisible div but still appears in search.
-
Completely agree. the easiest way to tell what a page truly renders is to use http://seo-browser.com/.
The method you mentioned does NOT hide content, unless it is set up that way in code on purpose, or in the template.
"My customer hired an "SEO Expert" who is telling them that this content is invisible to search engines."
Everyone is a self-proclaimed expert. I've been doing this 12 years, and still don't know everything, lol. I'm really happy you decided to post, and didn't go along with the herd.
-
Hi there Chris
If I'm understanding you correctly, I also agree with your conclusion. If you look at JS loaded content like on the bottom of this page (click the "read more" at the very bottom), that is all content that Google can see and parse.
You can also put this to the test yourselves. If you go to SEO Browser, insert your URL and press "simple", it will show you how your page looks to the Googlebot. If you can see that content that you talked about in the result page, you can be sure that Google sees it too. Definitely one of my favourite tools
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International SEO And Duplicate Content Within The Same Language
Hello, Currently, we have a .com English website serving an international clientele. As is the case we do not currently target any countries in Google Search Console. However, the UK is an important market for us and we are seeing very low traffic (almost entirely US). We would like to increase visibility in the UK, but currently for English speakers only. My question is this - would geo-targeting a subfolder have a positive impact on visibility/rankings or would it create a duplicate content issue if both pieces of content are in English? My plan was: 1. Create a geo-targeted subfolder (website.com/uk/) that copies our website (we currently cannot create new unique content) 2. Go into GSC and geo-target the folder to the UK 3. Add the following to the /uk/ page to try to negate duplicate issues. Additionally, I can add a rel=canonical tag if suggested, I just worry as an already international site this will create competition between pages However, as we are currently only targeting a location and not the language at this very specific point, would adding a ccTLD be advised instead? The threat of duplicate content worries me less here as this is a topic Matt Cutts has addressed and said is not an issue. I prefer the subfolder method as to ccTLD's, because it allows for more scalability, as in the future I would like to target other countries and languages. Ultimately right now, the goal is to increase UK traffic. Outside of UK backlinks, would any of the above URL geo-targeting help drive traffic? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Technical SEO - Where to begin?
Hi all, I'm looking to learn more about technical SEO. My background was digital marketing/PR where I learned the importance of links, of anchor text, of page speed, of improving UX signals, of SSL, utilising things like Google My Business etc. However, I find I am chasing my tail when it comes to things like understanding JS/CSS/log file analysis etc. I've tried reading so many articles on the subjects and I just find it so damn confusing. AnugalarJS/BackboneJS. Fetching & rendering, URL parameters...etc. I know from my own experiments that JS pages struggle to rank and I've created two very similar pages, one without JS, one with JS (which had far more links) and the non-JS page ranked far higher. So, I suppose I'm asking for some help with how to begin learning this stuff. I find the articles on Moz, Search Engine Land etc to be a bit confusing...maybe I'm not technically minded enough! Cheers, Rhys
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine0 -
SEO impact classifieds website
Hi, I'm part of an organization running a classifieds platform in Spain. (Mercadonline.es) We are hit by Google penalties since a few weeks, possibly caused by numerous errors we are experiencing. Most frequent errors are 404's and duplicate content (titles tags etc) since the nature of our website is dynamic. Many ads change daily, are added or removed, causing Googlebots (and others) to flag us and not being able to see our more unique content. Until what part of our platform should we be indexed? Since we have +34,000 pages indexed (mostly due to internal filter pages) I would need a systematic solution for us to display relevant and unique content, with enough usage of keywords that can bring us back up - we are actually ranked <50 on google for most of our main keywords. It is costing us precious time and money since we can only aquire our visitors (adwords etc) and not being to attract any organically. I can go in more detail with someone who can give me a bit more direction. Your answer is much appreciated! Ivor
Technical SEO | | ivordg0 -
Website redesign: impact on SEO rankings?
Hi We're redesigning a website for a client whose SEO rankings are fairly strong, and are driving a good volume of enquiries through their website. We would like to do our best to ensure the redesign has a minimal impact on the rankings but aren't sure if there's anything in particular we should be doing to avert a severe dip in results. The content will be similar on many pages, with the major updates being from 2013 products to the 2014 suite. Layouts and images will, of course be updated, and we're going to do our best to keep the inbound links going to the correct place - any advice here would be much appreciated, too. We'd be really grateful for any suggestions for how to avoid a ranking disaster, and any major pitfalls we should look out for. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kal-SEO0 -
Should i put an introduction on my site for better seo
Hi, my site is www.in2town.co.uk and we have been having serious problems with our site since our upgrade. Before the upgrade, our site was on the first page of google for many years and most of them we were in the top three, now however since the upgrade of our site we have had serious problems. The main keyword for our site was lifestyle magazine, but now after checking this keyword we are now on page 12, this has gone down over the past couple of days. we had an introduction and information about our magazine on the home page, trying to rank for the keyword lifestyle magazine, we were jumping from page nine to six to ten, we took the intro off as a developer said that we had done enough to rank well for the keyword without putting any text with the keyword on our site, but since taking it off, we have dropped down more in the rankings. I would love to hear from people on their thoughts on this and if we should put back the intro at the top or where they feel we should put it and should we put about the magazine at the bottom. I was always taught, if you want to rank well for a keyword then as well as doing all the linking, you also need to make sure you optimize the page with the keyword looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
SEO Tomfoolery
Oh Hai, I recently changed the permalink structure on my Wordpress based site, southwestbreaks.co.uk from the standard ?p=123 to a more SEO chummy /%postname%/. As a result, my site has completely dropped off the board for all my previously well ranked search phrases. Having since gotten into SEOmoz a bit more, I can see there are WP plugins available that apparently would've done this a lot more smoothly. I'd be most grateful if someone could explain if this drop off is just temporary, or have I somehow entered Google's shun book? The site has been like this for about 48 hours. Thanks, Tim
Technical SEO | | Southwesttim0 -
SEO LINKS
New to S.E.O. so excuse my naivety. I have made lots of new links some of them paid for e.g. Best of the Web but I don’t see any change in the latest competitive link analysis. Some of the links we have been accepted for just do not show. Also the keywords we are trying to promote the most have disappeared off the radar for over 2 weeks now. I think we have followed the optimization suggestions correctly. Please could you enlighten me. Regards Paul www.curtainpolesemporium.co.uk
Technical SEO | | CPE0 -
Which is best blogging platform from SEO POV?
I am curious to find out what is the blogging platform of choice for enterprize level companies (employees more than 500, revenue more tan 150M). What would be the best solution from SEO point of view? I have used Wordpress in the past for small companies and feel that is the best. We are currently using Telligent. Is anybody using it?
Technical SEO | | Amjath0