I was speaking to a friend last night (hallo Gremlin, if you’re reading) who has recently moved from developing Websphere applications to more general web apps (or that was the gist of the brief conversation, I hope I remembered the details right). I mentioned I do a bit of the AJAX stuff, and he said it looked an interesting technology. Which it is, but as with all technologies, it has its pitfalls.
One of which is the fact that a totally AJAX-driven application would be impossible for search engines to index. Think about it. If the only URL your application uses is your-clever-ajax-app.com, and everyhting else is done by AJAX, then your ranking in search engines won’t be impressive. In fact I don’t think it will be long before we find Google (they always seem to be on the ball regarding things like this) actively penalising a site that ‘hides’ content. Of course, they might do it already.
So I was glad to see that Forbes magazine, in their article on AJAX, threw in a word of caution about that very thing.
This post was brought to you by the letters A, J and X, and my thanks go to Ajaxian.com for keeping me abreast of the latest in AJAX.