Crickets Chirping

There are some problems with AJAX that lots of people complain about. For instance, it’s very unfriendly to people with accessibility needs and browsers on mobile platforms. It also breaks the back button (although that’s a pretty much solved problem at this point). Adam Alex Bosworth made a good list of other tricky issues.

But there are some others that are pretty tricky and not for obvious technical reasons.

AJAX and Ads

If you’re building a business around a web site that offers a free service you’re probably relying on at least some income from banner advertising. Guess what? The banner ad network thinks you’re only getting one page hit per user session even though you’re getting 100′s of clicks. None of those clicks triggers a new page load since your site is all AJAXified so the ad servers don’t know about them. You get paid for a single impression even though the user’s been pounding away on your sever resourcs for six hours.

Aint that a bitch. You want to use AJAX but it kills your ad impressions. It took like ten years for internet ad firms to come up with standards like CPM and banner ad sizes. How the hell are they going to figure out what to pay you for a “tab switch” or “scroll down” click? An AJAX action that repaints 25% of the visible pixels in the browser window should get you 25% of a page view? Good luck trying to bill them for it.

• Forbes: Nielsen/NetRatings doesn’t know how to measure your AJAX traffic.
• AJAX Counting Nightmares – This guy Eric Picard has been writing about the problem for a while.

There’s another problem which componds the first but it might be easier to deal with since it doesn’t require the internet advertising industry to agree on something.

AJAX and SEO

You want to drive lots of traffic to your site from search engines. The best way to do this is to doll up your site for when googlebot comes strollin’ by. He’s got strange taste so that means doing some odd things to your html. Odd things that most people don’t want to see or know about. This is known as the black art of Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. (Put on your boots because the BS gets thick around the “SEO Expert” crowd. It’s like real estate investment seminars or multilevel marketing, but with a highly technical twist.)

How is AJAX problematic for SEO?

Your javascript widget generates html inside the browser window. You want google to know about this html content so it will point people to your site. But GoogleBot doesn’t run the javascript that generates the html content in your widget, so it never sees that content and never indexes it. You must make this content appealing to Monsieur GoogleBot, and he likes static links to static-looking resources. Javascript ain’t so static looking to him so you have to slap some makeup on it to make it look that way.

Some interesting thoughts on how AJAX and SEO might play together nicely:

• SEO Considerations for AJAX Development
• AJAX and SEO- includes a demo of how to make AJAX links look more static