SEO in the World of Web 2.0

An example of progressive enhancement in action can be found at Amazon.com’s “Create Your Own Ring” on the Web. Simply turn off the JavaScript capabilities in your browser and build your ring — with or without the Flash interaction. All customers are equally served (http://tinyurl.com/yrh6o7).

Problems With AJAX

AJAX poses similar problems to spiders as Flash does. That’s because AJAX also relies on JavaScript — that’s what the “J” in AJAX stands for, after all. Search engine spiders can’t 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 “click-and-wait” frustrations associated with more conventional Web sites. It’s a great timesaver for users, but the additional content that’s pulled in via AJAX is invisible to the spiders unless it’s preloaded into the page’s 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.

Other options include rendering static HTML pages from product searches, as the vertical shopping engine Become.com does. Google’s 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, also 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 Eurekster’s Swicki (http://swicki.eurekster.com), which you may have seen in the sidebars of popular blogs like TechCrunch’s (www.techcrunch.com) “What’s Popular” buzzcloud. Under our tutelage, Eurekster made its widget more search engine friendly and reaped the benefits with a huge influx of search-referred traffic.