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In recent years, the internet has seen a major change in trends with regard to
functionality, Both the hardware and software have been improved greatly,
accompanied by improvements in the technology which websites use to actually
function. Technology that has become popular in recent years includes AJAX and
XML, most notably used to add real-time interaction to web pages. Of course,
with broadband now being widely available in developed countries, Search Engine
Optimisation or simply ``SEO`` is also a vital component of any web development
endeavor today. For the purposes of reference, it should be highlighted that
AJAX stands for ``Asynchronous Javascript and XML``. XML stands for ``Extensible
Markup Language``.
Whilst the possibilities offered by new technologies may be exciting, there is
an issue: almost all websites strive to receive traffic, thus they turn to SEO
techniques for the solution, yet technologies such as AJAX and XML are widely
believed to affect this optimisation process in a negative manner. This may
thus seem to be a situation where you can only have one or the other; if you
wish to rank well in the search engines then you should avoid using such
technologies to add functionality. Inversely, if you want functionality then
you may not fare too well in the rankings. However, there are a number of ways
in which you can have the best of both worlds.
To help understand the potential issues it is easiest to look at what the
search engines can ``see``. By default, most search engines will index plain text
only, for example Javascript within a webpage will be ignored. AJAX utilises
Javascript in order to perform instant actions in your browser. Additionally,
the purpose of search engines is to index any pages linked to your website.
AJAX uses Javascript and XML to essentially bring multiple pages into one. An
example of this would be a website selling multiple products. To achieve
effective SEO, you would hope that each individual product would be visited by
any search engine spiders and indexed, increasing the chance that your website
turns up during search results. AJAX negates the need for these additional
product pages; as the user clicks on each product they aren`t taken to a
specific web page, the XML information is simply read using Javascript code and
rendered onto the page. This makes the web page function far more quickly and
interactively as mentioned earlier, yet it hugely compromises SEO. From the
search engine spider`s point of view, your products all exist on the same page,
so the engine indexes one page whereas in reality you should hope for many more
to be indexed than this. In order to carry out the most effective web
development, the way in which search engines view a website must thus always be
taken into account.
So we have identified the problem and it is a fairly simple one: AJAX affects
SEO by reducing the number of pages that a user needs to visit in order to get
the same amount of information. This is because Javascript is ignored by many
search engines and any information requested through AJAX will be retrieved
from an XML source and rendered by Javascript thus causing it to be ignored.
One potentially effective way in which to achieve the desired SEO effect is to
use scripts which to detect whether or not a visitor to your website is a
search engine spider or not. By looking at some of the HTTP header request
information, this is arguably relatively easy to determine and can be achieved
in many prominent languages used for web development. Now, if the visitor is a
bot, they can be redirected to a version of the site which does not use AJAX or
XML functionality, instead using standard HTML output with no XML involved at
all. This way, the spider will be able to index everything in an unhindered
manner.
The issue here, however, is that you run the risk of a ``cloaking`` penalty.
Presenting one version of a web page to visitors and another to search engines
may mirror this spammy behaviour of a few years ago and may cause significant
if not catastrophic search engine ranking penalties.
Many consider that simply moving some of the AJAX script to external files and
triggering it via a hrefs as opposed to the traditional onclick event will
improve spidering and reduce the negative SEO effect although you will likely
need to combine AJAX and XML with other methods of web development, revolving
around using server-side languages such as PHP and ASP rather than solely
client-side languages such as Javascript. The reason for this is that
server-side languages only render static content: they may be dynamically
generated pages but the only thing reaching your browser is HTML which is (if
well structured) entirely SEO friendly. Others advise that you ensure that a
great deal of content is available when the page initially loads even if you
subsequently use AJAX can switch it out for the user. Of course, sometimes the
same functionality just isn`t attainable using server-side features, but most
the time you will be able to come surprisingly close.
All in all, when carrying out web development on a website which requires Web
2.0 interactivity such as AJAX, simple XML or plain Javascript but which also
needs SEO, ensure that when your web page reaches a browser, all important
content (including navigation links etc) can be read as stand-alone static
HTML. Webmasters shouldn`t have to choose between SEO and Web 2.0 so carry out
web development with this new understanding in mind.
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