Technical SEO question re: java

[Improvements]

Hi,

I have an SEO question that came my way, but it's a bit too technical for me to handle. Our entire ecom site is in java, which apparently writes to a page after it has loaded and is not SEO-friendly.

I was presented with a work-around that would basically consist of us pre redering an html page to search engines and leaving the java page for the customer. It sounds like G's definition of "cloaking" to me, but I wanted to know if anyone has any other ideas or work-arounds (if there are any) on how we can make the java based site more SEO-friendly.

Any thoughts/comments you have would be much appreciated. Thanks!!

[lavellester]

Yeah I agree the work-around sounds like it may be interpreted as black hat cloaking and get you in trouble.

Can you explain further how your application is working and why its not SEO friendly?

Cheers

[john4math]

I think you mean JavaScript and not Java.  What you're suggesting is what Google recommends in their AJAX crawling guide here http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/.  They want you to create a static HTML page to serve to Googlebot instead of your regular page.

Google is getting better at crawling JavaScript content that's loaded asynchronously, so you might want to dedicate your resources elsewhere.  On one of my sites, Google is indexing text that's loaded asynchronously (Bing isn't yet), and Matt Cutts has said that Google is crawling some comments that are loaded asynchronously, like Facebook comments (see http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexing-facebook-comments/35594/)

[Improvements]

Hi, Thanks for the reply. To begin, if you turn off javascript, you can't see any of the content on our pages - not the text, navigation, etc. I'm trying to figure out how to make the content displayable without having to re-do the entire system (which isn't plausible).

Does that make sense? The site is improvementscatalog.com if you want to see it. We're in the process of building content for it, but we just recently switched platforms and these new issues popped up.

[Improvements]

Hi, Thanks for the reply. To begin, if you turn off javascript, you can't see any of the content on our pages - not the text, navigation, etc. I'm trying to figure out how to make the content displayable without having to re-do the entire system (which isn't plausible).

Does that make sense? The site is improvementscatalog.com if you want to see it. We're in the process of building content for it, but we just recently switched platforms and these new issues popped up.

[Improvements]

Hi John,

You're right, I meant JavaScript. Thank you so much for the response. This definitely helps!

[lavellester]

Thought you were talking about "Java".  Needless to say JavaScript can cause all sorts of issues with SEO.

[Improvements]

Hi John, One more question for you if you don't mind... Creating an html snapshot (as noted in the ajax link) is different than a "serving up an html page" as described here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66355 ? Is that true?

[john4math]

With the AJAX crawlability guide implementation, Google knows they're requesting a different page than the one being shown to users, so it's not quite the same as cloaking.  That being said, you could go black hat and return a completely different page, but Google has their ways of finding these things out.

[Improvements]

Oooh no thank you - I'm not a big risk-taker when it comes to SEO. he-he. Thanks again for your help!