Does loading content from an ajax url count as a bounce rate

[luxresorts]

Hi,

Our current website http://www.luxresorts.com has sections that pull content through AJAX which is accessible through a URL.

For example, on our homepage, we have a section called "LUX* Magazine THE TASTEMAKER", if you click on "Read More" it would open on the same page while pulling content from this URL: http://www.luxresorts.com/en/posts/lux-magazine.

There are two concerns here:

a. the above url does not contain any google analytics code, does pulling content from a url through ajax cause a bounce rate?

b. since the url is indepenedent, the is no meta tags including title, description or even robot attributes. Should we treat this page as all other pages?

Thank you for your help.

Tej Luchmun

[HiveDigitalInc]

Hi Tej,

If you have Google Search Console set-up for the site, you can fetch/render the page from within search console and see what Google sees when they visit.

You can also try looking at the cache of the page to see what Google has rendered.

Also.. in response to B above, you should create a method to access that page directly via a specific unique URL, for which you can then specify the titles/descriptions.  In the application, where you have the links to load new content via ajax, you would set the pushstate to the permanent url where that page could be accessed, so Google can find/crawl those pages.

[luxresorts]

Hi,

Thanks a lot for your reponse, it is very useful.

We will try to push forward a virtual pageview, however, through some in-depth investigation, I noticed that Google does not crawl AJAX content.

We tried to follow the instructions of HIJAX from the following page, but unfortunately, could not find any evidence that it is working.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/learn-more

Do you know a way around to test if Google is able to crawl the content?

Thanks so much for your help.

Tej Luchmun

[HiveDigitalInc]

Yes, if the page doesn't lead to a new page view, then GA will count is as a bounce.

Since you are using ajax, there are some ways that you can simulate a page view on the content load so this doesn't happen...  For example, you can fire    _gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/url-of-ajax-content']);  when the new ajax snippet loads to simulate a new pageview.