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?