How would the rich snippets be treated in AJAX website?

[wspwsp]

Hi guys

We have started to rewrite our website http://www.edamam.com on AJAX, and the idea is to have all the website on AJAX in the next few months. Although it would probably be difficult to index even with the Google Crawling protocol, and some other issues might appear, the engineers insist that from technology point of view this is the best way to go.

We have already rewritten the internal search result pages, e.g. http://www.edamam.com/recipes/pasta and last week we set the Google Crawling protocol for AJAX to some of the individual recipe pages to test it.

I'd like to ask for you opinion on whether the rich snippets we have in the search results will be affected by this change? Are there specific actions we need to take to preserve them? What other hot tips you have for dealing with AJAX on any level of the website?

Thanks in advance

Lily

[Highland]

Google actually has an entire section dedicated to AJAX crawling. It's pretty technical but it IS possible to have your AJAX content indexed. You just have to jump through some hoops.

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/

[wspwsp]

Hi there

We have already discussed this internally. Our issue is that we prefer not to go with rewriting the URLs yet again, this time with the #! and looking for alternatives which still work with Google.

Any thoughts?

[Highland]

If your AJAX pages just return HTML, you could always add it to your sitemap but the catch there is you probably have some page wrappers that wouldn't show. You could add another query parameter to the sitemap URLs that would trigger a JS redirect so it would still load but with the wrapper for end users (Googlebot would ignore it). It's not a trick because you're not serving different content to Googlebot. It should do the trick but I can't say without knowing your setup as well as you do.

[wspwsp]

We have implemented meta tag for AJAX crawling. We did that on 4 pages and they were indexed through Twitter the same day, and now are out of the index again.

What we currently struggle with is finding a tool or way to check what Googlebot actually sees when crawling the site and we have the metatag set.

Can you help?

[James-Distinction]

Have you tried using a crawler to see what content it returns? e.g. http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

There's also a user agent switcher for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switcher-for-c/djflhoibgkdhkhhcedjiklpkjnoahfmg) that you can use to simulate Google.

Hope that helps.