Caydel’s SEO Blog

In the era of Web2.0, we are seeing the advent of AJAX technologies to drive web pages and applications. Which is good, for the most part - AJAX is a great tool. AJAX-powered pages and applications are often quicker and more responsive than their predecessors, since they don’t require full page loads for every possible operation, opting instead to reload and refresh only those parts of a page necessary.

On the flip side, AJAX can cause problems for search engines. Since the browser does not necessarily move to a new URL to display new data, much of the data and text content on an AJAX-powered site may not be accessible to search engines. Search engines will not submit forms or otherwise interact with the AJAX-powered sections of a site to cause page updates to be triggered, causing much of the content of an AJAX-powered site to be missed.

This is an issue for SEOs everywhere - as AJAX becomes more prevalent, client demand for this technology will continue to increase. So how do we deal with AJAX from an SEO perspective?

Rich McIver of SoftwareDeveloper.com emailed me yesterday to inform me of their latest feature article entitled, ‘‘. The article goes into some detail over techniques and best practices to help make your AJAX application search engine friendly. Some of the information is pretty standard (’submit a sitemap containing static copies of the fragments returned through AJAX’), while some of it deals with the problem at a more design / technical level, such as a presentation on ‘Hijax’ model of AJAX web design.

The article also goes into some common ways of handling AJAX for SEO purposes, and shows the shortcomings of these approaches.

How have you handled AJAX in your web pages / applications? Anything you would add beyond what the linked articles suggest?

It appears that Adbrite has performed a nice visual update to their advertisers’ interface. The new interface allows for more clearer organization, allowing AJAX-powered updates of your live bids etc. According to Kevin Weatherman of Adbrite, there will a corresponding update to the publishers’ interface ‘Coming Soon’!

(Click to Enlarge)

Additionally, advertisers will soon be able to create unique channels, or groups of sites, and run their ads solely across that group of sites. Sounds like there are a bunch of improvements coming soon from Adbrite - I can’t wait to see what else they have planned!

Share This

So, today I learned about RJS for Rails… RJS, or Remote Javascript, is a method which allows you to write complex AJAX scripts using Ruby syntax etc. Using RJS templates, it is possible to create extensive effects.

Now Rails has for a long time naturally includes some built-in functionality for AJAX, via the PrototypeHelper and ScriptaculousHelper libraries. Unfortunately, these two helpers would only allow one element in the DOM to be updated in an AJAX operation. That did not suit for what I wanted to do. Luckily, since Rails 1.0, RJS has been including. In addition to providing a simpler way to write AJAX functionality into your project, it also allows you to modify as many parts of the DOM as you wish per AJAX operation.

Of course, there doesn’t seem to be any good tutorials concerning RJS on the Internet. After looking for a while, RyanB from the Rails Forum suggested purchasing RJS Templates for Rails from O’Reilly. This is a great book - it comes as a PDF, and is only 60 pages or so, but is jam-packed with information on RJS, with code examples, and everything.

Because of this, I have been able to start implementing some AJAX functionality on a project for my employer. The visual effects from script.aculo.us are pretty cool, but the real benefits come from the increase of useability for the end-user. No longer does a user have to wait for page reloads etc. everytime he changes a vaue on the page. Plus, it is simple to link the AJAX pieces into your database, yielding an extremely ‘live’ page.
So, the moral of the story is, if you utilize Rails together with AJAX in any way, look into RJS - it can and will save you tons of time and energy, while vastly improcing your site design and useability!

Share This

So, I guess this has been around for a while, but I just found this today.

Google has released code to allow you to integrate an AJAX Google Search Box into your website. This means no more sending your users off to Google land when they want to find something. This is pretty cool.

This is called the Google Search API. If you want to find out more, you can check it out . The contains sample pages, and everything you need to implement it on your own site.

I think I might try implementing it into my site here.