Is there a widely used standard way on how to index ajax loaded content (for search engines)?
For example, indexing HTML content that would dynamically be inserted into a page.
Thanks
You may want to consider using some sort of sitemap generator that aggregates all the content you normally load through AJAX.
Sitemaps are particularly beneficial
on websites where:
Some areas of the website are not available through the browsable
interface, or
Webmasters use rich Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash content that is
not normally processed by search
engines.
From Wikipedia - Sitemaps
Remember that:
Because most web crawlers do not
execute JavaScript code, publicly
indexable web applications should
provide an alternative means of
accessing the content that would
normally be retrieved with Ajax, to
allow search engines to index it.
From Wikipedia - AJAX Drawbacks
In addition you may be interested in checking out the following articles:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog - A proposal for making AJAX crawlable
SoftwareDeveloper.com - How to: Get Google and AJAX to Play Nice
Crawling Ajax-driven Web 2.0 Applications
One way of doing this is using JS fallbacks for dialog boxes like thickbox: A link would point to the dialog box loading Ajax content, and the fallback href='...' would point to a search engine-readable representation of that content (i.e. the HTML snippet that the AJAX function would load, but surrounded by the necessary HTML body basics).
Example (I pulled rel='box' out of my arse, this is supposed to be the anchor for the box plugin, like rel=thickbox):
<a href='/encyclopedia/definition/mushroom.html' rel='box'>Definition of Mushroom</a>
Clicking on the link in a Ajax/JS enabled browser will open a nice dialog box with the article
Clicking on the link without JS (or as a search engine) will lead to a new page containing the article (which needs some server side intelligence to detect which channel the request came from).
That's all that comes to my mind in this direction. Ajax and search engines is a widely uncharted field otherwise.
Have Javascript fallbacks. Have a look at Amazon Diamond Search with and without Javascript enabled. Read up on http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006889.html
I don't really know the answer, but it seems to me that ajax-loaded content won't help to improve se positions because search engine can't refer to ajax-loaded content. Another words search engine can't say: "Hey, go here and then click 3rd button from the top to see the content you're interested in.".
I think that good idea is to put this content to xml and put link to this xml at tag (like URL to RSS)...
What about using an alternative content for JS disabled clients (search engines)? I think there is no other way of letting the search engines index your AJAX site properly.
I think actually only Google really implements a specification to index AJAX content.
It's the Google AJAX crawling specification.
We have used that for our website, there is an example in our technical blog on how to do that with Django in a clean way.
Related
I've just noticed that the long, convoluted Facebook URLs that we're used to now look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/example.profile#!/pages/Another-Page/123456789012345
As far as I can recall, earlier this year it was just a normal URL-fragment-like string (starting with #), without the exclamation mark. But now it's a shebang or hashbang (#!), which I've previously only seen in shell scripts and Perl scripts.
The new Twitter URLs now also feature the #! symbols. A Twitter profile URL, for example, now looks like this:
http://twitter.com/#!/BoltClock
Does #! now play some special role in URLs, like for a certain Ajax framework or something since the new Facebook and Twitter interfaces are now largely Ajaxified?
Would using this in my URLs benefit my Web application in any way?
This technique is now deprecated.
This used to tell Google how to index the page.
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/
This technique has mostly been supplanted by the ability to use the JavaScript History API that was introduced alongside HTML5. For a URL like www.example.com/ajax.html#!key=value, Google will check the URL www.example.com/ajax.html?_escaped_fragment_=key=value to fetch a non-AJAX version of the contents.
The octothorpe/number-sign/hashmark has a special significance in an URL, it normally identifies the name of a section of a document. The precise term is that the text following the hash is the anchor portion of an URL. If you use Wikipedia, you will see that most pages have a table of contents and you can jump to sections within the document with an anchor, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing identifies the page and Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test is the anchor. The reason that Facebook and other Javascript-driven applications (like my own Wood & Stones) use anchors is that they want to make pages bookmarkable (as suggested by a comment on that answer) or support the back button without reloading the entire page from the server.
In order to support bookmarking and the back button, you need to change the URL. However, if you change the page portion (with something like window.location = 'http://raganwald.com';) to a different URL or without specifying an anchor, the browser will load the entire page from the URL. Try this in Firebug or Safari's Javascript console. Load http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald. Now in the Javascript console, type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald';
You will see the page refresh from the server. Now type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#try_this';
Aha! No page refresh! Type:
window.location = 'http://minimal-github.gilesb.com/raganwald#and_this';
Still no refresh. Use the back button to see that these URLs are in the browser history. The browser notices that we are on the same page but just changing the anchor, so it doesn't reload. Thanks to this behaviour, we can have a single Javascript application that appears to the browser to be on one 'page' but to have many bookmarkable sections that respect the back button. The application must change the anchor when a user enters different 'states', and likewise if a user uses the back button or a bookmark or a link to load the application with an anchor included, the application must restore the appropriate state.
So there you have it: Anchors provide Javascript programmers with a mechanism for making bookmarkable, indexable, and back-button-friendly applications. This technique has a name: It is a Single Page Interface.
p.s. There is a fourth benefit to this technique: Loading page content through AJAX and then injecting it into the current DOM can be much faster than loading a new page. In addition to the speed increase, further tricks like loading certain portions in the background can be performed under the programmer's control.
p.p.s. Given all of that, the 'bang' or exclamation mark is a further hint to Google's web crawler that the exact same page can be loaded from the server at a slightly different URL. See Ajax Crawling. Another technique is to make each link point to a server-accessible URL and then use unobtrusive Javascript to change it into an SPI with an anchor.
Here's the key link again: The Single Page Interface Manifesto
First of all: I'm the author of the The Single Page Interface Manifesto cited by raganwald
As raganwald has explained very well, the most important aspect of the Single Page Interface (SPI) approach used in FaceBook and Twitter is the use of hash # in URLs
The character ! is added only for Google purposes, this notation is a Google "standard" for crawling web sites intensive on AJAX (in the extreme Single Page Interface web sites). When Google's crawler finds an URL with #! it knows that an alternative conventional URL exists providing the same page "state" but in this case on load time.
In spite of #! combination is very interesting for SEO, is only supported by Google (as far I know), with some JavaScript tricks you can build SPI web sites SEO compatible for any web crawler (Yahoo, Bing...).
The SPI Manifesto and demos do not use Google's format of ! in hashes, this notation could be easily added and SPI crawling could be even easier (UPDATE: now ! notation is used and remains compatible with other search engines).
Take a look to this tutorial, is an example of a simple ItsNat SPI site but you can pick some ideas for other frameworks, this example is SEO compatible for any web crawler.
The hard problem is to generate any (or selected) "AJAX page state" as plain HTML for SEO, in ItsNat is very easy and automatic, the same site is in the same time SPI or page based for SEO (or when JavaScript is disabled for accessibility). With other web frameworks you can ever follow the double site approach, one site is SPI based and another page based for SEO, for instance Twitter uses this "double site" technique.
I would be very careful if you are considering adopting this hashbang convention.
Once you hashbang, you can’t go back. This is probably the stickiest issue. Ben’s post put forward the point that when pushState is more widely adopted then we can leave hashbangs behind and return to traditional URLs. Well, fact is, you can’t. Earlier I stated that URLs are forever, they get indexed and archived and generally kept around. To add to that, cool URLs don’t change. We don’t want to disconnect ourselves from all the valuable links to our content. If you’ve implemented hashbang URLs at any point then want to change them without breaking links the only way you can do it is by running some JavaScript on the root document of your domain. Forever. It’s in no way temporary, you are stuck with it.
You really want to use pushState instead of hashbangs, because making your URLs ugly and possibly broken -- forever -- is a colossal and permanent downside to hashbangs.
To have a good follow-up about all this, Twitter - one of the pioneers of hashbang URL's and single-page-interface - admitted that the hashbang system was slow in the long run and that they have actually started reversing the decision and returning to old-school links.
Article about this is here.
I always assumed the ! just indicated that the hash fragment that followed corresponded to a URL, with ! taking the place of the site root or domain. It could be anything, in theory, but it seems the Google AJAX Crawling API likes it this way.
The hash, of course, just indicates that no real page reload is occurring, so yes, it’s for AJAX purposes. Edit: Raganwald does a lovely job explaining this in more detail.
We have an AngularJS site using HTML5 routes. I just did some test "Fetch as Google" runs. The results are a bit confusing:
On the fetching tab, I see our site as it looks on view source, with all the front end bindings {{ }}, and not all the HTML rendered
On the rendering tab, our site looks perfectly fine, no {{ }} variables, it seems like Google bot fetched and rendered the site fine, which is maybe in line with this, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ae/2014/05/rendering-pages-with-fetch-as-google.html.
However, we are already prepared for Google to not be able to crawl our site, so we have already added , so the Google bot revisits our page with “?_escaped_fragment_=". We followed this, https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started (section "3. Handle pages without hash fragments"). In our Nginx config we have something like this:
if ($args ~ "_escaped_fragment_=") {
serve the static HTML snapshots
}
, and indeed it works fine, if we pass the _escaped_fragment_= ourselves. However, the Google bot never tried to crawl our site with this param, so it never crawled the snapshot. Are we missing something? Should we also add agent detection for Google bot on our Nginx conf? Something like this?
if ($http_user_agent ~* "googlebot|yahoo|bingbot|baiduspider|yandex|yeti|yodaobot|gigabot|ia_archiver|facebookexternalhit|twitterbot|developers\.google\.com") {
server from snapshots
}
It would be great if we can understand this better, thank you so much in advance!
UPDATE:
I just read this, http://scotch.io/tutorials/javascript/angularjs-seo-with-prerender-io?_escaped_fragment_=tag#caveats. So, it seems that when using the manual tools (Fetch as Google), we should pass ourselves either #! or ?_escaped_fragment_= in the right place. Indeed, if I pass ?_escaped_fragment_= in our case, I do see the HTML snapshot that we have created.
Is that true? Is this how it works indeed?
UPDATE 2
On the bottom of this thread, a Google employee verifies that for Google Webmasters "Fetch as Google", you need to manually pass the _escaped_fragment_= param yourself, https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/fZjdyjq0n98/PZ-nlq_2RjcJ
Cheers,
Iraklis
I will try to answer your questions based on our experiences in the last month of developing a SPA with HTML5 mode.
How do I get Googlebot to use ?_escaped_fragment_= instead of the direct links.
This is actually quite simple but easy to overlook. In fact, there are two different ways to get Googlebot to try the escaped_fragment. The first method is to run your site in non-html5 mode. This means that your URLs will be of the form:
http://my.domain.com/base/#!some/path/on/website
Googlebot recognizes the #! and makes a second call to your server with an altered URL:
http://my.domain.com/base/?_escaped_fragment_=some/path/on/website
Which you can then handle as you wish. The second way to get Googlebot to try _escaped_fragment_ mode is to include the following meta tag on the index page you supply to the bot:
<meta name="fragment" content="!">
This will make googlebot check the other version of the webpage every time it sees the tag. Interestingly you can use both these techniques together or you can do what we ended up doing, which is running in html5 mode with the meta tag. This means that your URLs will be escaped as follows:
http://my.domain.com/base/some/path/on/website?_escaped_fragment_=
Interestingly, the bot will not put anything at the end of the fragment. But depending on what webserver you are running, you can easily map this with a pattern matching the "_escaped_fragment_" text to your alternate bot page. For more information on the escaped fragment go here.
"Fetch as Googlebot" returns two different versions of my page, the source with {{}} and the rendered page looking correct. What does that mean?
Google's Bots can actually interpret JavaScript to a limited extent since early 2014. For more information, read the official blog entry on google webmasters here. However, as is made clear in the blog entry, this comes with a lot of caveats. For instance:
Googlebot does not guarantee to execute all javascript code.
Googlebot will attempt to find links in the javascript to follow and use them to help find more pages.
Googlebot will render the preview in webmasters tools by executing as much of the javascript as it can (thus the lack of {{}} in the rendered version).
Googlebot will not necessarily use the rendered version in order to build the meta information about your site for its index.
As of 18/12/2014, we are still unsure if Googlebot can actually extract any information from an SPA in rendered mode for its index beyond finding links to follow in the javascript. In our experience, Googlebot will include {{}} in its index listing so that when you try to use {{}} to fill meta information (description, keywords, title, etc...) your site looks like this in Google Search results:
{{meta.siteTitle}}
http://my.domain.com/base/some/path/on/website
{{meta.description}}
rather than what you expect which might look like this:
Domain
http://my.domain.com/base/some/path/on/website
This is a random page on my domain. An excellent example page to be sure!
GoogleBot for Search Engine uses _escaped_fragment_ but we can not be sure for other services
Google recommend to serve an HTML snapshot of AJAX website by using hashbang (#!) and _escaped_fragment_ param.
But as often for new Google feature all Google services do not support it from the begging.
For now, by experience, we are sure GoogleBot for indexing webpage use HTML snapshot and _escaped_fragment_. You can check your Server Access Logs to be sure Google did it on your application.
(For now and by experience, nothing official by Google) other services like PageSpeed Insight, Webmaster Tools parser, Richsnippet testing tools, etc.: hasbang (#!) is not supported. You have to use _escaped_fragment_.
Should you use User Agent detection to serve HTML snapshot?
No. Just don't. For different reasons :
You just do not know which services/bots on the web would like to parse your content and you can not be exhaustive (for instance, think of all the social networks existing on the web using Bot to create a snippet of your content : you can not handle them one by one)
This can be considered as cloacking : serving a different version depending on type of user on the same URL, which is basically wrong for SEO.
Google looks for #! in our site urls and then takes everything after the #! and adds it in _escaped_fragment_ query parameter. Some developers create basic html pages with real data and serve these pages from server side at the time of crawling. So , why not we render same pages with PhantomJS on serve side which has _escaped_fragment_.
For more detail please read this blog .
Maybe a bit outdated, but for the completeness:
According to the statement from May 23, 2014 Google bot is now able to "see your content more like modern Web browsers".
According to their statement from October 14, 2015 Google deprecated the AJAX crawling scheme.
So using the HTML5 History API (html5mode in angular) should be no problem to Google.
I've created a HTML page where I'm using body's onLoad callback, fetching content from a Servlet via Ajax call and sending it to a div (the content contains info about books - each book as a table containing title, tags, author etc.).
Now I wonder when I submit this page to a search engine, will the bot be able to crawl this ajax content?
Any help/suggestions appreciated!
No. Search engines, in general do not crawl Ajax content. The only exception is Google's crawlable ajax proposal which you apparently did not implement. But its use is discouraged anyway. So your website is definitely not search engine friendly.
What you should have done is built the site to work without JavaScript and then used progressive enhancement to make it work better with JavaScript enabled.
Is it possible to make JSON data readable by a Google spider?
Say for instance that I have a JSON feed that contains the data for an e-commerce site. This JSON data is used to populate a human-readable page in the users browser. (I.E. The translation from JSON data to human displayed page is done inside the users browser; not my choice, just what I've been given to work with, its an old legacy CGI application and not an actual server-side scripting language.)
My concern here is that, the google spiders will not be able to pickup/directly link to the item in question when a user clicks on it in google, being presented with an index page full of all the items, rather than being linked directly to the item they clicked on.
Is there anyway of "informing" the google spider in the JSON that what they should feed the user a different link?
While Google does crawl and index JavaScript in some circumstances, it's still best to serve "normal" (X)HTML content if at all possible. In this case, it would help to know the rest of the site's setup, in particular: is the JSON content just used to create a feed of links to the product pages (with static content) or are all product pages also generated by JSON feeds? If the feed is only used to point to the actual product pages (which are static) then one way to make the product pages discoverable could be to create a HTML sitemap page or some other alternate form of navigation. A XML Sitemap file can also help, but I would recommend not using it as the sole way of making the product pages discoverable.
If all of the content is only accessible through JSON feeds, then I think you will have to make some bigger changes if you want that content to be accessible through search results.
One way to handle it could also be to use the new JavaScript crawling/indexing proposal, which basically would result in a headless browser being set up between your site and Google: http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/ (whether setting this up or revamping the rest of the site is easier is hard to say :-))
You should make a wrapper page in server-side code around the JSON data, and respond to requests with either the wrapper or the regular version depending on the User-Agent.
Our software manages libraries, museums, archives etc. We'd like to let the users (namely the catalogers, not the visitors) add some embedded content such as Google maps, YouTube videos etc. We'd like the solution to be as flexible as possible, as each embedded content provider has it's own format. OTOH, we'd rather not allow the users to enter raw HTML, as this will impose both a XSS security risk and in case of erroneous HTML might screw up our surrounding web page.
I started looking into Google Maps today, and couldn't find a way to handle it. I don't want to let the users just copy the embedding HTML snippet into an item; I can't embed the link URL provided, as Google won't allow it; and I can't let the user specify the coordinates, as I don't want to use the Google Maps JS API (which means providing a built-in solution which we'll have to maintain).
The question in not specifically about Google Maps, but Google Maps is quite representative. I'd love to hear suggestions for a flexible-yet-secure HTML embedding technique.
Thanks,
Eran
Would Caja work for you?
Caja (pronounced "KA-ha") is "virtual
iframes": it allows you to put
untrusted third-party HTML and
JavaScript inline in your page and
still be secure. Caja
gives stricter control over what the code can do:
no redirects to phishing pages: the window object the untrusted code has is a fake one created by the containing page
no malware: all requests to URLs are proxied
no XSS: dynamic HTML sanitization
allows the untrusted code more power than is safe to give to code currently in iframes. Here are some possibilities:
floating frames ("info windows")
frames don't have to be rectangular
frames can communicate without the current awkward protocols
a reader could broadcast geographic information about the current article; a maps gadget jumps to the location, while a news gadget gets local stories and a weather gadget pulls up the weather
similarly for financial info or entertainment info
an extensible syntax highlighter could have plugins that can mark up text but not leak the contents to another website
can be a bit channel (can only send information) or a code channel (can send functions)
hosting page can control who talks to whom
markdown or other lightweight markup language for markup; custom macros for embedding allowed snippets (see like it is done on wordpress.com to embed youtube videos)