Ajax, XML, and SEO

[~ The 34 Year Buzz!!]

A question about Ajax, XML, and SEO:

The end-user sees a page with titles, brief descriptions, and perhaps dates or locations listed on the left side.
The right side of the web page is a section for details, initially showing only the 'default' info.

Now the end user clicks on any of the titles, and Ajax + an XML document produce the expanded details on the right side.

Q) Will Google bots 'see', and index, the entire XML page-with all the details (and links?), or is the indexing limited to what the end-user first sees?

Do bots 'follow along' when Ajax is involved??

Thank you.

 

[Teddy]

This is one of the major problems with bots and Ajax. They do not follow the pages or index the content that is loaded with Ajax. If the content is not able to be called upon from a URL (for example using Ajax to load content on a page) it can not be spidered by a SE. The content must be accessible by a separate URL for a bot to spider it.

This is how I understand it and I don't always get it right, so if anyone has anymore info on this please feel free to correct me.

 

[~ The 34 Year Buzz!!]

More info...

This is one of the major problems with bots and Ajax. They do not follow the pages or index the content that is loaded with Ajax. If the content is not able to be called upon from a URL (for example using Ajax to load content on a page) it can not be spidered by a SE. The content must be accessible by a separate URL for a bot to spider it.

This is how I understand it and I don't always get it right, so if anyone has anymore info on this please feel free to correct me.

Thanks, for the quick answer.
I found a solution, but don't understand how to use it.

AJAX and SEO: How to have an SEO Friendly AJAX website using jquery

 

[DylanButler]

That author is just dancing around a basic topic of web usability which is to make gracefully degrading code, this includes creating fallthroughs for non-JS users. That means create a non-JS version, set the <a href="nonjsversion.htm"> and just override the default event when the link is clicked (by returning false, or using YUI's preventDefault() as I prefer).

<a href="addToCart.php?item=apples" onclick="addToCart(apples, event)">

Is better than

<a href="#" onclick="addToCart()">

It often creates work that you'll sometimes feel is pointless, but it can actually help out a lot (not only for SEO, but also printing and also accessibility).

Hope this helps,

Dylan