A couple year ago, Google released best practices on how to make AJAX crawlable for search engines. But as I covered last week at Search Engine Land, those guidelines may go away.
Gary Illyes said at SMX West last week that Google may announce they no longer will support those recommendations and will come out with a blog post as soon as now (but it seems likely it won't happen till later) explaining why. In fact, I believe (I can be wrong) that Gary said sites designed in AJAX provide a poor user experience to users and implied to me (I can be wrong) that it is almost as bad as going with Adobe Flash (okay that might be an exaggeration).
So I decided to ask John Mueller about that since I am getting a lot of questions around what will Google announce around AJAX. I asked him at 7:03 mark in the Google+ video hangout and he said:
I think if he [Gary Illyes] announced that we are going to announce something, then maybe it is best to wait for that announcement.The bigger picture is that we’ve gotten better and better at rendering AJAX. So it’s generally less of an issue that you need to do something like an AJAX crawling workaround to actually make this content accessible to do that.
So its something if we can render the page directly then why should you have to go through this kind of magic dance to create this alternate version of your web site to kind of serve specifically to Google. So that is kind of like the bigger theme in that. That is the direction we have been heading for a while. So we are getting better and better at rendering JavaScript, we got it worked out for pretty much most kind of pages. So the next logical step would be to say, well you don’t need this kind of magic work around anymore. You just focus on us being able to render those pages right.
So it seems like Google is going to say that don't bother with those recommendations anymore. Google should be able to crawl advanced JavaScript, like AJAX, just fine. But keep these following things in mind - although I am not sure what those things will be.
When will Google announce this? Gary Illyes from Google did comment in another Google+ thread saying "That's still in works, Barry Schwartz. We still need to figure out a few things."
Here is the video at the start time of the question:
Forum discussion at Google+.
