full ajax site and SEO

Question

Hi

i am planing to start a full ajax site project, and i was wondering about SEO.

The site will have urls like www.mysite.gr/#/category1 etc

Can Google crawl the site.

Is something that i have to noticed about full ajax and SEO

Any reading suggestions are welcome

Thanks

Answer 1

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/768233/do-hashes-in-urls-affect-seo

You might want to read about so called progressive enhancement.

Answer 2

The search engines will spider the initial page load - what happens to the page (with ajax) after that is irrelevant to listings.

Answer 3

I don't think Google is capable of doing so (yet) http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html

However you can of course make your site usable with or without JavaScript. That way, browsers will have the full candy stuff and Google (and text browsers) still can navigation your site.

Answer 4

In addition to SEO, you also need to think about usability standards here. A site that is that reliant on AJAX isn't going to work for things like screen-readers as well as spiders. You need a system for graceful degreadation. A website that can't function without JavaScript isn't really a functioning website.

Answer 5

Google supports indexing of AJAX sites, but unfortunately it involves extra work for the developer. See http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html