Don't Use Ajax for Your Website

As web 2.0 becomes the craze that is taking over the internet. More and more companies are developing websites and applications using AJAX. If you look at job postings on Monster or Dice, one of the most common web developer requirements is that the candidate of experience with AJAX.

Find a website that uses Ajax, right click and select view source. What do you see... html, head, and body tags. Thats about it, there is no source code to be read. Here is the issue, what you see when you click "view source", is the same thing that Google's web site crawler sees. Which means that Google sees a blank page equaling no text or information for Google to cache and index.

If Google (and the others) cannot read your websites content, then your website will not show up in search results. In order to have an Ajax website that is compatible with search engines, you have extra work to do.

IMHO: Leave Ajax for intranet and extranet websites, websites that are private and not indexed or searched by search engine crawlers. It is not worth the time or money to program extra code so that a search engine can index your site.

Chris