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Google May Discontinue Its AJAX Crawlable Guidelines

Does your site use AJAX? Well, Google may stop crawling those pages. More details to come from Google as early as next week.

Barry Schwartz on March 5, 2015 at 10:30 am

For almost five years now, Google has been offering proposals on how to make AJAX, asynchronous JavaScript and XML, crawlable for search engines, but those efforts might be ending. Ending as soon as next week.

Gary Illyes from Google commented during a panel at SMX West that since Google was able to render your full page starting back in May 2014, it may discontinue the AJAX crawlability recommendations offered in the Google Developer center.

Gary said you may see a blog post at the Google Webmaster Blog as soon as next week announcing the decommissioning of these guidelines.

It is unclear if Google will completely stop crawling AJAX in this fashion or slowly phase it out as it gets better and better at rendering and interpreting more complex forms of JavaScript.

Gary did add a personal opinion during the panel that sites built completely in AJAX do not provide the best user experience to their users.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.