Will AJAX cause my site to have a high bounce % and hurt my search ratings?

Question

I'm building an art gallery website that updates its images via AJAX, for those who have javascript enabled, rather than request multiple page loads. I assume this will appear as though my site has a high bounce percentage. I understand that search engines will not be able to index dynamic content, but will such a misinterpreted bounce rate hurt my search engine ratings, even if I have many return visitors?

Answer 1

Short answer, no.

Bounce rate is (if even relevant here) is the least of your problems. Worry more about the content on the page. The search engines are much better at reading dynamic content than they used to be.

If your site is 100% dynamic ajax... you might have problems. IF it's just a gallery, you'll be fine IMO. Use nice titles on pages, text on pages, alt tags etc... give the spiders lots to read.

Answer 2

it actually may have good bounce rate via ajax which do not normally counted by normal anlaytics ( google or whatever) systems. bounce rate is normally indicator of user activity on your site and does not depend on how much time the url changed.

Answer 3

I use GWT on my penwag.com website, and for some time used the approach where it was nearly 100% AJAX. I did a revamp not too long ago (see http://penwag.blogspot.com/2010/04/april-penwag-update.html) basically to change who's in the driver's seat. Now, The basic navigation is controlled by HTML, there's a lot more HTML content than there used to be. This helps in a number of ways. First, search engines have more to work with. Second, the navigation is simpler. Third, separation of concerns is easier to achieve, since each page is its own module. Fourth, integration with third-party tools is more seamless. Things that specifically affected penwag.com were Google Ads integration and Google Friend Connect integration. This is probably true of most gadgets out there: they're designed to be embedded in HTML, and embedding them into a GWT component is harder.

Some of what I said here is specific to GWT, but a lot of it is true whatever AJAX framework you're using.