AJAX requests and implication for SEO

[FashionLux]

Hi,

I got a question in regard to webpages being served via AJAX request as I couldn't find a definitive answer in regard to an issue we currently face:

When visitors on our site select a facet on a Listing Page, the site doesn't fully reload. As a consequence only certain tags of the content (H1, description,..) are updated, while other tags like canonical URLs, meta noindex,nofollow tag, or the title tag are not updating as long as you don't refresh the page.

We have no information about how this will be crawled and indexed yet but I was wondering if anyone of you knows, how this will impact SEO?

[evolvingSEO]

Hi - right, then if the URL changes for the user, you'll want to probably use the PushState method (linked above) to convey this to Google. They likely can't see the URL change by default.

You can check by trying to crawl the site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider with the user agent set to Googlebot. Then go to "outlinks" for the page with the facet links, and see if they are listed.

Hope that helps some more! Let me know if you need further direction.

-Dan

[FashionLux]

Hi Dan,

Yes, the URL would change in both cases (AJAX request as well as for a complete refresh).

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

Hi - right, I should have answered your specific situation too

When the user selects a facet - does this change the URL too? Meaning, it's supposed to be a totally different page?

[FashionLux]

Hi Dan,

Although it doesn't address the specific question I had I think your link is a good start for me to dig into the topic in more detail.

Many Thanks,

[evolvingSEO]

Google recently updated how they prefer AJAX is handled:

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax-crawling-scheme.html

They now recommend using the PushState Method - I won't pretend to know all the intricacies of how it works for implementation, but that's the best method to go with. If you need any more help let us know, and I'll have another associate jump in and take a look.

-Dan