Making AJAX Applications Crawlable (By Google)
Many websites are using Ajax requests to interact with databases, load content, etc. in order to stay dynamic without page refreshes.
However, any content loaded with Ajax can not be viewed inside the "source of the website" which ends up in non-crawlable web pages.
Google is sharing a detailed information on "making Ajax applications crawlable" which shows how the search engine sees the web pages and things to improve that.
Google simply asks us to:
- use "#!" signs after any URL that generates content with Ajax (like: www.example.com/ajax.html#!mystate)
- create the HTML without Ajax (besides the Ajaxed version) when www.example.com/ajax.html#!mystate is browsed
- update the website's sitemap with the new URLs
The ! sign will be indicating that the content at that part of the web page is Ajax crawlable and Google will crawl the URL (which generates the HTML content) and add it to its search results as a part of the web page.
Although it seems pretty complicated, considering how important it is to getting indexed by Google, it is (almost) a must for Ajaxed websites.