Are AJAX sites crawlable by search engines?

Posted by frankadelic on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by frankadelic
Published on 2009-07-23T06:34:46Z Indexed on 2010/04/22 4:43 UTC
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I had always assumed that AJAX-driven content was invisible to search engines.

(i.e. content inserted into the DOM via XMLHTTPRequest)

For example, in this site, the main content is loaded via AJAX request by the browser:

http://www.trustedsource.org/query/terra.cl

...if you view this page with Javascript disabled, the main content area is blank.

However, Google cache shows the full content after the AJAX load:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:JqcT6EVDHBoJ:www.trustedsource.org/query/terra.cl+http://www.trustedsource.org/query/terra.cl&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

So, apparently search engines do index content loaded by AJAX.

Questions:

  • Is this a new feature in search engines? Most postings on the web indicate that you have to publish duplicate static HTML content for search engines to find them.
  • Are there any tricks to get an AJAX-driven content to be crawled by search engines (besides creating duplicate static HTML content).
  • Will the AJAX-driven content be indexed if it is loaded from a separate subdomain? How about a separate domain?

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