Is SEO as Effective on AJAX Sites?

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Hey Everyone,

I had a potential client contact me about doing SEO for their site and I see that they have an AJAX site where all the content is rendered dynamically via AJAX.  I've been doing SEO for years, but never had a client with an AJAX site.  I did a little research and see how you can setup alternative pages (or snapshots as Google calls them) with the actual content so the pages are crawlable and will get indexed, but I'm wondering if that is as effective as optimizing static HTML pages or if Google treats AJAX page alternatives as less trustworthy/valuable.

Also, does having the site in AJAX effect link building and social sharing?  With the link structure, it seems there could be some issues with pointing links and passing link juice to internal pages

Thanks!

Kurt

[max.favilli]

To avoid any risk of being penalized you need to be very careful to do not cloak. For example, in my experience if you tweak content serving different version of the page to javascript enabled browser and browser without JS is fine. But if you change something when you detect the http request is coming from googlebot, even if you change just a title, google gets very very angry.

Link building is not affected, do not encourage people to link using hashbang.

I don't remember about canonical, I don't think so, but just check the google docs I linked earlier.

But, as I said earlier, I strongly suggest to do not use hashbang, and redesign the app to use ajax the way I described earlier.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Thanks Max.

So, as long as I optimize the content, especially in the alternative HTML version of the page, there shouldn't be any negative effects for rankings, correct?

Does it affect link building to internal pages?  Would I encourage people to link to/share the nicer URLs with #! or the escaped_fragment URLs?  Do I need to setup canonical tags for the escaped_fragment URLs?

Thanks.

Kurt

[max.favilli]

Hashbang is a thing of the past.

Google became pretty good at executing JS as explained by Matt Cutts in one of his video.

But a part from google juggling with JS...

What you need to do is design the server “served” page optimizing it for SEO, loading with server side technology all the data you want to be indexed for, and loading with ajax the data you don't care about being indexed for. Loading doesn't mean display, you load the content on the page with server side technology, and you use client side technology to show and hide according yo users interactions with you UX.