SEO Considerations for AJAX Development

If web development is even remotely within your periphery, you've probably heard of AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. While most serious developers realize the hype is overblown, even the most caffeine-addled code monkeys are impressed with some recent AJAX applications. Calling AJAX "new" is a little misleading, and it's no different from calling gin & tonic poured over Cap'n Crunch a "new" breakfast treat. The ingredients have been around forever; only the unique combination is recent. Explained simply, the key benefit of AJAX applications is their ability to work in the background to supply data to the client browser and provide a relatively seamless "application" experience instead of the click-wait, click-wait game of traditional web pages. The "J" in AJAX (JavaScript) has been a stumbling block for developers with an eye for search-engine friendliness, but that need not be the case. While it's true that engines typically ignore scripted data, good AJAX programs can occasionally come out of their JS trances long enough to feed even the most demanding bots. Following are some notes about AJAX development as it pertains to smart SEO. The Problem: Not Enough Unique URLs In my opinion, the single greatest SEO issue with AJAX is the tendency (although not necessity) of AJAX applications to not judiciously create unique, bookmarkable (and therefore indexable) URLs. I'll use Google Maps as an example, not only because it's used in this excellent AJAX backgrounder written by an IBM engineer, but because Google Maps has come to be known as the "classic" AJAX application. If you have brand awareness like Google, you don't necessarily need too many deep, internal URLs, because everyone remembers and links to "maps.google.com". But for the rest of us, getting many internal pages indexed is critical. Like the IBM article mentions, the fact that Google put the "Link to this page" feature on the Maps page shows that they understand the need for unique URLs pulled from within the application. Depending in what you're doing with AJAX, you'll derive a ton of SEO benefit from a similar philosophy. A secondary point is that once you've created the capability to create unique internal URLs, you'll need to post them somewhere so they can be crawled. For example, suppose you had an AJAX application that enabled celebrities to build a custom automobile. After enough celebrities had built them, you'd need to build a page that links to those deep links, such as "See Tyra Banks' custom Bentley" or "Ashton Kutcher's punk'd-out Prius," for example. You'll also need a system that can create custom, relevant titles and meta descriptions for these deep URLs, since the amount of body copy on a page likely won't be particularly plentiful or relevant. The Other Problem: Too Many Unique URLs Looking at the other side of the coin, you can also have usability issues by creating too many unique, indexable URLs. Microsoft's Live.com (the beta edition of its search site, which I reviewed in March) is an example. if you go to www.live.com and search for [vacation rentals], you'll get a resulting URL like http://www.live.com/#q=vacation%20rentals&offset=1 But if you scroll through Live.com's "infinite" results long enough, the "offset" argument starts to tick upwards. Before you know it, you'll be at "offset=20" or something like that. Not necessarily a big deal, until you decide to hit the "Back" button and go to your previous site. You'll need to hit it up to 20 times to get back to that site, since each time you hit it, you merely decrement the offset argument by one. See this post by Microsoft's Robert Scoble for more on this. (Read the comments too; they're a nice contrast to the post, and a great reality check for developers.) Other issues to consider when developing in AJAX aren't as critical to SEO as the URL issue, but they're still important. These include load time, which can be as bad as bloated Flash if you're not careful, and disabling browser controls that the user has come to rely on - never a good move. By Erik Dafforn