The AJAX crawling scheme has been used by webmasters for the last six years after Google recommended it as a way to ensure the search giant was crawling their sites in the most effective way.
Now, Google is no longer recommending the method, which allowed users to benefit by making content from AJAX-based sites that offered rich and interactive content universally accessible through searches.
At the time of its initial backing for the scheme, Google said it thought that the process would “significantly improve the web.” This was because as recently as 2009, the search engine’s crawlers couldn’t see any content that was being created dynamically and it couldn’t render pages using JavaScript.
The changes that have been introduced since, both on Google’s side and, of course, in the technology that most users have in their devices, means that the AJAX crawling scheme is now outdated.
Essentially, as long as a website owner doesn’t block Googlebot from crawling JavaScript or CSS files by using a robots.txt or any other method, the search engine can understand and render pages perfectly well.
Negative search impact
A Google blog post from last year covered things that could cause a negative impact on its ability to search results for a website.
A trio of Google employees contributed to the post, which said: “We recommend allowing Googlebot to retrieve JavaScript and CSS so that your content can be indexed better. This is especially important for mobile websites, where external resources like CSS and JavaScript help our algorithms understand that the pages are optimised for mobile.”
New assumptions
Now, Google says that the assumptions from the AJAX crawling scheme proposal are no longer valid and that the principles of progressive enhancement should be adopted instead.
This is essentially a web design methodology that places an emphasis on accessibility, semantic HTML markup and external stylesheet and scripting.
Google Search Quality Analyst Kazushi Nagayama explains in a new Google blog post: “For example, you can use the History API pushState() to ensure accessibility for a wider range of browsers (and our systems).”
Google also invites anyone looking for more information to post questions in the Google Webmaster Help forum or in response to Nagayama’s blog post itself.
