The Glitch of Crawling Ajax Content: Harmful For Your SEO

No! I didn’t throw a bunch of typical words to call it a blog title. If it sounded a little typical to you, chances are that you’re a beginner web developer using Ajax set of technology for your project.

So, let’s begin with knowing what Ajax actually is and how opting for the Ajax web development turns out for your website’s SEO.

What is AJAX?

AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. With the help of this set of web development techniques, the professional developers are able to develop highly interactive and feature-rich web applications.

With Ajax web development, the web browsers interact with the web user through JavaScript.

When to use AJAX?

• 1. AJAX can be used anywhere in a web application when the information can be accessed or saved in small amounts from the server. Thus, no need of posting back a whole page, just like it’s done in data validation.
• 2. AJAX is used for updating certain parts of an HTML page without using a page refresh or redirect.
• 3. The Ajax web development is best suited for the development of web applications that need a fast loading time to deliver the best UI/UX.

Crawling Ajax Content

The reason why Ajax is always in the news for troubles to the SEO of web applications is that the technology relies wholly on JavaScript. This forbids Google to crawl Ajax loaded content.

JavaScript is a client-side scripting language and the search engines are well optimized for crawling the HTML language and not JavaScript. To get the search engines to crawl JavaScript, there is a need for additional resources that increase the cost of operation of the search engines.

The search engines do not indulge in the activities that increase their cost of operation. Thus, there is always a pertaining issue with the ability of search engines to crawl Ajax web content. If your content is not crawled, or say, seen by the search engines, using Ajax web development might prove out to be harmful for your SEO.

You might need a continuous support of professional SEO services to improve the Ajax SEO optimization of your websites or web applications.

As simple as it sounds, if your web content is not crawled by Google or the other search engines, how do you expect to rank with the Search Engines? Regardless of the quality of web development and content marketing services you use, without the search engines being able to crawl your content, you would never be able to rank well in the search engine results.

Thus, from the perspective of SEO, your website might not be a big success when developed with Ajax web development.

However, it’s not that there is no solution to this glitch. Google came up with a solution to the problem a number of times.

Earlier, the webmasters were advised to implement the ‘Ajax crawling scheme of Google’ which was introduced in 2009. The scheme introduced the web developers to a technique through which the Ajax web pages could become crawlable by Google.

Even with the introduction of this scheme, many of the websites were unable to make their content crawlable. However, now that time has changed and the technology has gotten more advanced, in 2015, Google became adaptable to Ajax web development.

Google search engine and browser implemented the advanced features and resources through which they are now able to crawl the JavaScript pages and the Ajax web application content is easily crawled.

The Problem Prevails

As claimed by Google, it is clear that the enhancement in resources and features helps Google crawl Ajax loaded content.

But is SEO all about Google?

There are other popular search engines like Bing and Yahoo that are still unable to read the JavaScript web pages. Thus, the web applications or websites created using the Ajax web development are still harmed in terms of SEO.

There is another technique of making your Ajax content crawlable by the search engines, called the ‘Hijax Technique’. The technique allows the web developers to code the Ajax web pages in the right format so that they can be easily crawled by the search engines and browsers.

For help in this regard, you can seek expert web developers and professional SEO services.

Also, the right Ajax experts now know their game with developing the SEO-friendly web pages using advanced tools and techniques. So, care must be taken while choosing the Ajax web development services. Make sure you select the best and most competent professional for your web development needs.

To conclude, it can be said that Ajax web development didn’t seem suitable enough from the SEO perspective in the beginning. But with time, advancements are being made to make the Ajax web pages crawlable for search engines, making the technology suitable for web development for the longer run!
Related Read: Innovative SEO Strategies to opt for in 2017 for B2B Lead Generation