1. “Googleable” Ajaxed Content
- Varun Grover

2. Background
 Most content is dynamic (not just static html pages).
 Search is the primary navigation tool.
 Google search is the de­facto search tool for most ­ people "google" the stuff they are looking for.
 We are increasingly making use of Ajax to fetch and serve content.
 Trouble with Ajax is that the URL doesn’t change. Often, the URL is appended with a hash mark (#).
 HTTP spec does NOT allow UAs to send URL fragments in requests.
 However, we do want the Ajaxed content to be crawlable for improved search ranking.

3. Google's new initiative
 A new standard for making AJAX­based websites crawlable.
 Benefits businesses and users by making content from rich and interactive AJAX­based websites
universally accessible through search results on “any search engine that chooses to take part”.
 Some of the target goals behind this initiative:
 Minimal changes are required as the website grows
 Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
 Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
 Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus
that the crawler has access to all the content


4. The fundamentals
 Progressive enhancement
 Well, if you already do this, this is not a valid problem at all!
 Hijax

5. The implementation
 Indicate to the crawler that your site supports the AJAX crawling scheme
 www.example.com/ajax.html#!key=value
 Set up your server to handle requests for URLs that contain _escaped_fragment_
 www.example.com/ajax.html?_escaped_fragment_=key=value
 Handle pages without hash fragments
 <meta name="fragment" content="!">
 Consider updating your Sitemap to list the new AJAX URLs
 Optionally, test the crawlability of your app: see what the crawler sees with "Fetch as Googlebot"

6. The bad parts
 Arbitrary. Its approach is akin to using a sledgehammer for nuts (pun is not intended).
 One lesser reason for people to produce progressive, accessible, semantic websites.
 In fact it can push adoption of WAI­ARIA guidelines down into the drain. Rather than forcing the site
owners to make the sites available to “all” users, it allows them to focus on just “one” user – the
googlebot.
 Needs site owners to change the URI scheme (or, at least, the fragments).
 No flexibility in the specs for using a different fragment prefix.
This is like saying "we know you have no idea how to build rich user experiences and we don't expect
you to change things so we will do our best to crawl everything”.