AJAX, along with Flash the ugly kid of web development for SEO, was introduced in 2005. The expectations were high but it never really got popular. A survey in October 2008 reported that 3.20% of the web pages tested used the XMLHttpRequest DOM object, an important part of AJAX.

The combination of AJAX and SEO has never been a good one. SEO has a strong fundamental basis in the document structure of the web. AJAX creates possibilities to discard the document structure of the web and offers a way to create single page websites. Gmail for example is a single page website.

AJAX and SEO seem like two worlds which cannot be united, or can they? While extensive use of AJAX should be a threat to SEO it doesn’t get that much attention. A search for ‘AJAX SEO’ in Google returns mainly articles dating from 2006, 2007 and 2008. Time for a little update. (more…)