How can Ajax get you into trouble with Google

We love to improve our website using Ajax. An Ajax based website looks great while providing above and beyond interactivity for the users. However, you might get your website into trouble with the majority of search engines especially Google. They might update their web crawlers to efficiently read an Ajax based website but until today, the texts that you write in JavaScript will never be read by Google.

Even with beautiful designs and a promise of better interactivity, a website that is not crawled by search engines will never get the buzz it needed. In fact, here are some of the things we might do to our Ajax based website that will make us struggle in the search engine game. If you do not have a very expensive online and offline marketing campaign for your website, better follow these:

Really Simple Websites – Google can read the texts and the URLs of the website, even the sub-links. In Ajax, we can always forget about the sub-links and let the user stay on the same webpage. Panel after panel is changed in a webpage without even a single sub-link is displayed. Google does not recognize the text inside the panel and will just take a look at the URL – which does not tell much of your website.

No Back Buttons – Ditching the back button and different browser functions for the sake of Ajax is disastrous to your search engine. With the back and history buttons deactivated, the links and the texts inside the webpage is not recognized by the browser. This is just simple logic: since search engines are browser based, it reads the pages in the browser. If they are not indexed because of Ajax, nothing is being read.

Ditching Google’s Webmaster Tools – I cannot say that Google has reached the God-like status but they are close to being one. Webmaster tools of Ajax are simple and non-obtrusive to your webpage so you better get this tools become a part of your webpage or else you do not exist as much as Google is concerned.

Cloaking – This is bad for your website. Some of the developers have built two versions of their website: an Ajax based and a simple HTML counterpart. The HTML is not seen but this is used solely to divert the visitors to the Ajax based counterpart. Although this is made for a good cause, it has been exploited by web marketers just to increase their hits. Google does not allow this and when you are caught doing this, not only you ranking will go down but your site will NEVER be indexed by Google.

DHTML Layering

– This used to be the simple answer to build your Ajax based application that is user friendly at the same time. This is not cloaking and this might be effective but still, DHTML requires JavaScript to work as expected. Remember that anything that comes with JavaScript can never be read by web crawlers. You are back to the drawing board when you worked so much in DHTML and when you have infused JavaScript as part of your web development.