AJAX and Bing Indexation
-
Hello. I've been going back and forth with Bing technical support regarding a crawling issue on our website (which I have to say is pretty helpful - you do get a personal, thoughtful response pretty quickly from Bing).
Currently our website is set with a java redirect to send users/crawlers to an AJAX version of our website. For example, they come into - mysite.com/category..and get redirected to mysite.com/category#!category. This is to provide an AJAX search overlay which improves UEx. We are finding that Bing gets 'hung up' on these AJAX pages, despite AJAX protocol being in place. They say that if the AJAX redirect is removed, they would index and crawl the non-AJAX url correctly - at which point our indexation would (theoretically) improve.
I'm wondering if it's possible (or advisable) to direct the robots to crawl the non-AJAX version, while users get the AJAX version. I'm assuming that it's the classic - the bots want to see exactly what the users see - but I wanted to post here for some feedback. The reality of the situation is the AJAX overlay is in place and our rankings in Bing have plummeted as a result.
-
Hi, thanks for your response, and I apologize for the delay in responding!
In our current state, removing the AJAX links would be extremely difficult.
We do actually have the AJAX Crawling Protocol in place, which is, conceivably why Google is able to crawl us and our rankings are basically unchanged.
After speaking again with Bing's Support, they did acknoledge that they DO follow the escaped_fragment we set up, but that a rel="canonical" tag to the non-AJAX version was creating what they called in infinite indexation loop..whereby a java redirect at the non-AJAX, sent them to the AJAX, and a rel canonical sent them back to the non-AJAX. They suggested that if we wanted them to index the "Pretty" AJAX version, we remove the rel canonical pointing to the non-AJAX url. They didn't suggest putting the Pretty AJAX url in the rel canonical - I'm wondering if they may be a solution?Ideally, we'd have them index the non-AJAX url (though it seems like that isn't possible? Sorry this is so convoluted!)
In the meantime, we've removed rel canonical entirely from this level of our website..but at the moment rankings haven't really been affected.
Any suggestions? It feels like AJAX may be just completely inadvisable for Bing.
-
I recommend doing as the Bing Engineers say. Since you have the same content in both AJAX and non-AJAX, it is in your best interest to serve the content in a way that both Search Engine Crawlers and Users benefit.
The best way to do so is by sending Search Engines to the non-AJAX / static version and sending users to the AJAX version. I'm a little surprised that only Bing has a problem and Google does not for you because Google usually requires the AJAX Crawling Protocol in order to index AJAX.
Please let me know if this helps. I used to have an identical solution on one of my accounts and this resolved it.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to index Backlink Fast
hi, From the past some month i am facing the problem in indexing backlinks, please share the method to index backlink in google fast
Technical SEO | | vijay231 -
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
How to setup an iFrame to be indexed as the parent site
Hi, we are trying to move all of our website content from www.mysite.com to a subdomain (i.e. content.mysite.com), and make "www.mysite.com" nothing more than an iFrame displaying the content from content.mysite.com. We have about 10 pages linking from the home page, all indexed separately, so I understand we'll have to do this for every one of them. (www.mysite.com/contact will be an iframe containing the content from content.mysite.com/contact, and we'll need to do this for every page) How do we do this so Google continues to index the content hosted at content.mysite.com with the parent page in organic results (www.mysite.com). We want all users to enter the site through www.mysite.com or www.mysite.com/xxxxxx, which will contain no content except for iFrames pulling in content from content.mysite.com. Our fear is that google will start directing users directly to content.mysite.com, rather than continue feeding to www.mysite.com. If we use www1.mysite.com or www2.mysite.com as the location of the content, instead of say content.mysite.com, would these subdomain names work better for passing credit for the iFramed content to the parent page (www.mysite.com)? Thanks! SIDE NOTE: Before someone asks why we need to do this, the content on mysite.com ranks very well, but site has a huge bounce rate due to a poorly designed CMS serving the content. The CMS does not load the page in pieces (like most pages load), but instead presents the visitor with a 100% blank page while the page loads in the background for about 5-10 seconds, and then boom 100% of the page shows up. We've been back and forth with our CMS provider about doing something about this for 5 years now, and we have given up. We tested moving our adwords links to xyz.mysite.com, where users are immediately shown a loading indicator, with our site (www.mysite.com) behind it in an iFrame. The immediate result was resounding success... our bounce rate PLUMMETED, and the root domain www.mysite.com saw a huge boost in search results. Problem with this is our site still comes up in organic results as www.mysite.com, which does not have any kind of spinning disk loading indicator, and still has a very high bounce rate.
Technical SEO | | vezaus0 -
Indexing Issue
Hi, We have moved one of our domain https://www.mycity4kids.com/ in angular js and after that, i observed the major drop in the number of indexed pages. I crosschecked the coding and other important parameters but didn't find any major issue. What could be the reason behind the drop?
Technical SEO | | ResultFirst0 -
Indexation and visibility problem
Hi I am working on a website (usarrestsearch org) for 6 months. I wrote about 100 pages full of good content. for some reason I see only 75% of the pages indexed in GWT. and Im having problems with SERP positions not rising. I suspect that it might be connected to the structure of the site. will appreciate any help thanks
Technical SEO | | holdportals0 -
Index problems
“The website http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/nl/ does not show in the index of Google (site:vaneyckshutters.com/nl/). This must be the homepage in the Netherlands. Previously, the page www.vaneyckshutters.com was redirected to /nl/. This page is accessible now with a canonical tag to http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/nl/ in the hope to let /nl/ be indexed. When we look at the SERPS for keyword ‘shutters’, the page http://www.vaneyckshutters.com/ is shown in Google.nl on #32 and in Belgium #3. Problem & question: Why is it that /nl/ has not been indexed properly and why is it that we rank with http://www.vaneyckshutters.com on ‘shutters’ instead the/nl/ page?”
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Yahoo Local SERPs Index Issue
I recently updated all my website page Titles and was checking to see how many have been crawled so far. On Yahoo/Bing I noticed something very strange when entering site:bandpages.ie in the search field. Selection Buttons (top of SERPs): 'Web' search shows all my pages indexed 'UK' has has most pages 'Only In Ireland' has just 1 page indexed - which is the site RSS Feed and nothing else! The site has been live for 2 years now. Considering we don't trade with the UK and our main focus is here in Ireland - what is going wrong? Why doesn't Yahoo/Bing index list the site pages in the Ireland index? Any insights or solutions appreciated...
Technical SEO | | Ubique0