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Today's question comes from Lancaster, where Ant wants to
know, "How effective is Google now at handling content
supplied via Ajax, and is this likely to improve in the
future?"
Well, let me take Ajax, which is Asynchronous Javascript,
and make it just Javascript for the time being.
Google is getting more effective over time, so we
actually have the ability not just to scan in strings of
Javascript to look for URLs, but to actually process some
of the Javascript.
And so that can help us improve our crawl coverage
quite a bit, especially if people use Javascript to help
with navigation or drop-downs or those kinds of things.
So Asynchronous Javascript is a little bit more complicated,
and that's maybe further down the road, but the common case
is Javascript.
And we're getting better, and we're continuing to improve
how well we're able to process Javascript.
In fact, let me just take a little bit of time and
mention, if you block Javascript or CSS in your
robots.txt, where Googlebot can't crawl it, I
would change that.
I would recommend making it so that Googlebot can crawl the
Javascript and can crawl the CSS, because that makes it a
lot easier for us to figure out what's going on if we're
processing the Javascript or if we're seeing and able to
process and get a better idea of what the page is like.
So I absolutely would recommend trying to check
through your robots.txt, and if you have disallow slash
Javascript, or star JS, or star CS, go ahead and remove
that, because that helps Googlebot get a better idea of
what's going on on the page.