The integration of AJAX into web pages has brought improvement in user experience. But at the same time, it also posed some challenge on search engine visibility, a roadblock enough to stifle the sustained adoption of the new web technology. Similar to Flash earlier in the decade that offered splashy animations, AJAX offered new levels of human interaction on the Web. Yet that brilliance Flash offered waned and instead got loathed later on as its notoriously long loading times and invisible content became target of user experience and search engine marketing specialists.

 

Make no mistake, Flash and AJAX isn't one and the same. Unlike Flash animations that can take a minute to load, AJAX even cuts the time to load certain web page content. That's because with AJAX technology that allows multiple layers of content to be placed in a frame, loading a page is not necessarily required. However, this feature also is one of the major sticking points AJAX-powered pages are somewhat challenging to search engines. While we acknowledge that there is progress made to bridge the gap between in AJAX and conventional HTML pages.

 

How do we go further and make our AJAX pages crawlable by search engines?

 

Basically Google suggests of simple URL tweaks -- specifically proposing to use a token character "!" 

 

Rob Ousbey illustrates what Google proposes and tells us how to make use of hashbang (a rather new term that refers to a combination of hash tag "#" and exclamation point "!". By using a hashbang, Google can detect that a page is implementing a certain protocol and right away captures the value following the symbol and uses it as a URL parameter tag.