Status of Ajax and SEO? Changing navigation from plain HTML to AJAX.

[gerardoH]

We will change an old school  HTML drop down navigation for an AJAX drop down one.

What's your experience in regards to Google indexing AJAX?

I know that Google is now able to read more stuff than in the past, but I need some stories "from the trenches" if you're willing to share.

Thanks in advance.

[john4math]

On one site I work on all of the content is loaded with AJAX.  I've seen evidence that Google is indexing this text, because if I search for this AJAX content, Google is returning those pages on my site for which it appears on. There aren't many backlinks to these pages, and none that I've found with those phrases as anchor text. So if Google is finding this text out from somewhere else, I can't figure it out.

I'd still rather have our content loaded normally, but I wasn't given a choice, so I'm glad to see it's working.  I'd think long and hard before setting up HTML snapshots as given here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/, as doing so would be a considerable amount of work, especially considering how far Google has already come with indexing AJAX content.