SEO and AJAX

I would like to get people's opinions on how you deal with mainly AJAX linked sites.

This poses a problem for SEO's. I have an approach that I use but I would like to know what other people do when dealing with a site that uses an AJAX navigation system.

I have created an AJAX SEO Linking Test to determine what effect if any AJAX links have.

Read the Digg Article on this test, feel free to digg it!

Any help you can give with this is appreciated.

Thanks,

Trevor Stolber

No Thoughts on this????

I have read the following articles
A larger issue then the screen readers, even if disabled users are your target market, is the fact that search engines do not parse JavaScript on a page when reviewing the content. This indicates that they will not see much of the content that is contained in the scripted portion of the page. A partial solution to this is the use of the<noscript>tag.

The careful use of this tag will provide the search engine some static content to review, in addition to providing information for users that are not able to access the dynamic content. Be careful to make this content the best that you can. Make every effort to provide the same content in the <no script> tag as you would find in the AJAX portion of the page. If the content contained in the tag appears too divergent, competitors may report your site as "spam". If a manual inspection by a search engine rep finds the content too dissimilar, you may find your pages ignored.
Source:http://www.marketposition.com/blog/archives/2006/08/implementing_aj.html

Thanks for your comments.

You are correct, to a point, however search engine spiders are much more advanced than they used to be.

Search engines can now read some javascript and follow javascript links - see the test here

I am still very doubtful that they will be able to find the AJAX content on the test site I have.

Speaking of which a link to the test page would be very useful, please use the following code.



Does anyone have any experience of SEO'ing a predominantly AJAX based site?

Thanks

Does anyone use AJAX? I would really like some input on this test.

What is AJAX? Is their any benefits on using this?

What is ajax

As an update, the test site I have been experiamenting on has not had any AJAX only links indexed.

I tried various methods of trying to get spiders through to the content that has no hyperlinks. None of these methods worked as expected.

The live AJAX site that I have seems to be doing ok as it has some good links too all pages and all pages are accessible via a sub indexable layer.

It is still not ideal though and causes problems with user tracking.

I would love to find a really good way of getting spiders to navigate through such sites but I don't think it is very practicle and as such would not recomend using AJAX for navigation if search engines are even a slight consideration.