Ajax vs. Search Engines

Ajax is one of the best internet technologies that’s being implemented and developed by millions of developers even as we speak. The program was launched in 2005 and so far it has lived up to its hype of being one of the most user friendly websites.

The challenge though was that coding this type of website is really difficult as it’s a combination of programming languages that only the experience programmer could do. That’s why different toolkits were created by different internet companies to help not so good developers create their very own Ajax-based website.

OpenAjax Alliance even created a hub where you can combine different toolkits (mash-ups) and create one giant Ajax based program. However, with all the user friendly experience that Ajax has to offer, creating a site that purely runs in Ajax is not so good in search engines.

If you’re a web developer whose aim is to create SEO friendly websites, better reconsider in creating a website that’s Ajax based. Apparently most search sites, such as Google, doesn’t easily recognize Ajax and index the site in their top results. That’s definitely a bad news for web developers in the SEO industry.

Even though how cool your site is, you won’t get that much hits easily. In return, you won’t be able to generate revenues from your Ajax based website. The reason why search engines are not really that friendly to Ajax based websites is their inability to be recognized or crawled by search engines.

Ajax runs with JavaScript, and this tool doesn’t give much information to search engines. Most of the time, Ajax is being implemented so that users won’t have to wait for a response from the website. Ajax will give you the ability to work in real time with the information.

The request/response protocol is definitely not there and the only way a website could be indexed is through that protocol. That situation is also the same with Flash based websites. Even worst, Flash is not recognized by search engines because they are not good for those who can’t really see.

Mobile users can’t even access websites with Flash. If you don’t have a good connection to the internet, you can forget about accessing flash websites. Ajax is doomed to have the same fate except that it doesn’t require a good internet connection to be accessed. If you’re website doesn’t have the interaction the search engine wants, you need to have a good follower to get good hits.

If you’re just a website that hopes Google will index your site to earn money, you should at least combine your Ajax experience with HTML. Having Ajax is a great thing but search engines unfortunately are not really friendly in this kind of website.

It’s a great disappointment to most developers but for now, we just have to live with that fact. As long as search engines uses the request/response protocol to judge what information are being fed to your site, stick to HTML and just use Ajax once in a while.