Ajax Module Crawability vs. WMT Fetch & Render
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Recently a module was built into the homepage to pull in content from an outside source via Ajax and I'm curious about the overall crawability of the content.
In WMT, if I fetch & render the content it displays correctly, but if I view source all I am seeing is the empty container. Should I take additional steps so that the actual AJAX content displays in my source code, or am I "good" since the content does display correctly when I fetch & render?
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Hey Scott,
You're good. If you see it in the fetch and render, you're seeing it as Googlebot sees it.
Google has had capabilities to crawl Ajax content for some time now. And while you don't see the content when you view source, that's not a big a problem. As long as the content is on the page at load Google should not have a problem indexing it. So after load, you should look in the Inspect Element section, that's how Google will see the content.
Where there may be crawlability issues is in content that requires user action to display. Google is inconsistent with how many actions they will attempt in order to index content.
-Mike
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