AJAX and Bing Indexation

[Blenny]

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.

[Blenny]

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.

[CatalystSEM]

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.