This article was originally published under Search Engine Land.
Wouldnโt it be great if all those whiz-bang Web 2.0 interactive elements based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flashโsuch as widgets and gadgets and Google Maps mashupsโ were search engine optimal?
Unfortunately, thatโs not the case. In fact, these technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So, if you intend to harness Web 2.0 technologies for wider syndication, increased conversion, improved usability and greater customer engagement, youโd better read on or youโll end up missing the boat when it comes to better search engine rankings.
When it comes to AJAX and Flash, the onus is on you to render them search engine friendly. The major search engines just canโt cope with these Web 2.0 technologies very well at all.
Flash not friendly
Letโs start with Flash, a technology with which many of us already are familiar. Some search engines, including Google, have rudimentary means of extracting content and links from Flash. Nonetheless, any content or navigation embedded within Flash will, at best, rank poorly in comparison to a static, HTML-based counterpart, and at worst, not even make it into the search engineโs index.
Googleโs view on Flash is that it doesnโt provide a user-friendly experience. Flash is wholly inaccessible to the vision-impaired, unrenderable on devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, and canโt be accessed without broadband connectivity.
In particular, Google frowns on navigational elements presented exclusively in Flash. Given this stance, Google isnโt likely to make big improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon. So, itโs in your hands to either replace those Flash elements with a more accessible alternative like CSS/DHTML or to employ a Web design approach known as โprogressive enhancement,โ whereby designs are layered in a concatenated manner to provide an alternative experience for non-Flash users. This way, all users, including search engine spiders, will be able to access your content and functionality.
An example of progressive enhancement in action can be found at Amazon.comโs โCreate Your Own Ringโ on the Web. Simply turn off the JavaScript capabilities in your browser and build your ringโwith or without the Flash interaction. All customers are equally served.
Problems with AJAX
AJAX poses similar problems to spiders as Flash does. Thatโs because AJAX also relies on JavaScriptโthatโs what the โJโ in AJAX stands for, after all (the complete acronym stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Search engine spiders canโt execute JavaScript commands (or Java either, for that matter). AJAX can be used to pull data seamlessly in the background onto an already loaded Web page, sparing the user from the โclick-and-waitโ frustrations associated with more conventional Web sites. Itโs a great timesaver for users, but the additional content thatโs pulled in via AJAX is invisible to the spiders unless itโs preloaded into the pageโs HTML and simply hidden from the user via CSS.
Here, progressive enhancement renders a non-JavaScript version of the AJAX application for spiders and JavaScript-incapable browsers. A low-tech alternative to progressive enhancement is to place an HTML version of your AJAX application within noscript tags (see TheCleanerMovie.com for an example).
Other options include rendering static HTML pages from product searches, as the vertical shopping engine Become.com does. Googleโs guidelines warn that your search result pages must provide value to users to warrant inclusion in its index. So, extra care must be taken if employing this approach.
Widgets, the mini applications webmasters are encouraged to place on their sites to pull data from an external source, are in most cases inaccessible to search engine spiders. Most widgets are built in search engine unfriendly Flash or AJAX.
A well-loved widget in the blogosphere is Eureksterโs โSwicki,โ with its โWhatโs Popularโ buzzcloud, which you may have seen in the sidebars of popular blogs like TechCrunch. The โWhatโs Popularโ buzzcloud. Under our tutelage, Eurekster made its widget more search engine friendly and reaped the benefits with a huge influx of search-referred traffic.
As you head down the road of Web 2.0, just remember that user-friendly doesnโt readily translate into search engine friendly without some assistance. But know that help is available, particularly in the form of progressive enhancement, when you embrace this brave new World Wide Web.


