Google's ability to crawl AJAX rendered content
-
I would like to make a change to the way our main navigation is currently rendered on our e-commerce site. Currently, all of the content that appears when you click a navigation category is rendering on page load. This is currently a large portion of every page visit’s bandwidth and even the images are downloaded even if a user doesn’t choose to use the navigation.
I’d like to change it so the content appears and is downloaded only IF the user clicks on it, I'm planning on using AJAX. As that is the case it wouldn’t not be automatically on the site(which may or may not mean Google would crawl it). As we already provide a sitemap.xml for Google I want to make sure this change would not adversely affect our SEO.
As of October this year the Webmaster AJAX crawling doc. suggestions has been depreciated. While the new version does say that its crawlers are smart enough to render AJAX content, something I've tested, I'm not sure if that only applies to content injected on page load as opposed to in click like I'm planning to do.
-
Google's official recommendation is just to unblock js/css and let it figure it out since it's smart enough now. I personally like to give as many suggestions/clues to follow as possible so that it doesn't get confused.
IMO, the onclick/href hybrid is probably the best for user experience. With proper canonicals set up (so that Google only indexes 1 version and avoids any duplicates), it's also my suggested method for SEO.
-
Thanks Oleg,
The link you sent for the webmaster page had been deprecated since Oct 2015, does your recommendation still hold?
-
check out https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/learn-more#current-practice
Essentially, you should have the AJAX load "onclick" but have the "href" link to the hardlink for people who don't have JS enabled (and crawlers).
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
-
Google adding text to SERP title which isn't relevant
Hi guys, I have a site with around 300 articles on it and these articles came from three old domains which were migrated during a Wordpress domain migration almost four months back. There The problem I'm having is that for quite a lot of the articles in the SERP, Google is adding '- Maine Coons' to the end of the title. One of our old domains was related to this breed of cat so at least in Google's eyes it must have something to do with this I guess. I've attached a screenshot that shows one such example. What's odd is a lot of the new content that has been created also has this suffix added and it doesn't show in any other search engine. So, it doesn't appear in other search engines and it's not coming from the article itself (proved also via developer tools inspecting the code). So, Google is adding it but as you can see in this example (there are many more) it has absolutely no relevance to the post. Has anyone seen this behavior or have any idea how to fix it? I've tried all kinds of things and have even hired SEO 'experts' that haven't been able to see any problems. Any clues? Thanks, Matt K71Y3P9
Technical SEO | | mattpettitt0 -
Mobile first - what about content that you don't want to display on mobile?
ANOTHER mobile first question. Have searched the forum and didn't see something similar. Feel free to passive- aggressively link to an old thread. TL;DR - Some content would just clutter the page on mobile but is worth having on desktop. Will this now be ignored on desktop searches? Long form: We have a few ecommerce websites. We're toying with the idea of placing a lot more text on our collection/category pages. Primarily to try and set the scene for our products and sell the company a bit more effectively. It's also, obviously, an opportunity to include a couple of long tail keywords. Because mobile screens are small (duh) and easily cluttered, we're inclined _not _to display this content on mobile. In this case; will any SEO benefit be lost entirely, even to searchers on desktop? Sorry if I've completely misunderstood mobile-first indexing! Just an in-house marketing manager trying to keep up! cries into keyboard Thanks for your time.
Technical SEO | | MSGroup
Ross0 -
Google Search console says 'sitemap is blocked by robots?
Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt." I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this: User-Agent: *
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian
Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?1 -
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Medium sizes forum with 1000's of thin content gallery pages. Disallow or noindex?
I have a forum at http://www.onedirection.net/forums/ which contains a gallery with 1000's of very thin-content pages. We've currently got these photo pages disallowed from the main googlebot via robots.txt, but we do all the Google images crawler access. Now I've been reading that we shouldn't really use disallow, and instead should add a noindex tag on the page itself. It's a little awkward to edit the source of the gallery pages (and keeping any amends the next time the forum software gets updated). Whats the best way of handling this? Chris.
Technical SEO | | PixelKicks0 -
When do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster?
Hi, I was wondering when and how often do you use 'Fetch as a Google'' on Google Webmaster and do you submit individual pages or main URL only? I've googled it but i got confused more. I appreciate if you could help. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rubix1 -
Are URL's with trailing slash seen as two different URLs
Hello, http://www.example.com and http://ww.example.com/ Are these seen as two different URL's ? Just as with www or non www ? Or it doesn't make any difference ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Should I have a 'more' button for links?
I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0
