AJAX and SEO

[ChrisInColorado]

Hello team,

Need to bounce a question off the group.  We have a site that uses the .NET AJAX tool kit to toggle tabs on a page.  Each tab has content and the content is drawn on page load.  In other words, the content is not from an AJAX call, it is there from the start.  The content sits in DIV tags which the javascript toggles - that's all.

My customer hired an "SEO Expert" who is telling them that this content is invisible to search engines.  I strongly disagree and we're trying to come to a conclusion.  I understand that content rendered async via an AJAX call would not be spidered, however just using the AJAX (Javascript) to switch tabs will not affect the spiders finding the content in the markup.

Any thoughts?

[AlanMosley]

You are spot on, all you are doing to hiding and showing, if you can see it with fetch as googlebot you have no problems.

[ChrisInColorado]

All - thank you so much for your help and validation of what I assumed. I've been doing this for about 17 years too and when this guy threw this over the fence at me on a conference call I was confused.  Then the client freaked out, etc.

Oleg - using a similar example I copied some content from the site in question directly into the Google search just like you did with facebook.com and there it was.  Indexed, plain as day.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Your "SEO Expert" is wrong and the content is indexed. This is most notable in FAQs... clicking on the question drops down the previously invisible div with the FAQ answer. Both the question and answer is indexed by search.

Here is an example... searched phrase is in an invisible div but still appears in search.

https://www.google.com/search?q="If+you+can+log+into+your+account%2C+we+recommend+changing+your+password.+If+you+can%27t+get+into+your+account+you+can+secure+it+here."&rlz=1C1SKPL_enUS434US440&oq="If+you+can+log+into+your+account%2C+we+recommend+changing+your+password.+If+you+can%27t+get+into+your+account+you+can+secure+it+here."

[David-Kley]

Completely agree. the easiest way to tell what a page truly renders is to use http://seo-browser.com/.

The method you mentioned does NOT hide content, unless it is set up that way in code on purpose, or in the template.

"My customer hired an "SEO Expert" who is telling them that this content is invisible to search engines."

Everyone is a self-proclaimed expert. I've been doing this 12 years, and still don't know everything, lol. I'm really happy you decided to post, and didn't go along with the herd.

[TomRayner]

Hi there Chris

If I'm understanding you correctly, I also agree with your conclusion. If you look at JS loaded content like on the bottom of this page (click the "read more" at the very bottom), that is all content that Google can see and parse.

You can also put this to the test yourselves. If you go to SEO Browser, insert your URL and press "simple", it will show you how your page looks to the Googlebot.  If you can see that content that you talked about in the result page, you can be sure that Google sees it too. Definitely one of my favourite tools

Hope this helps!