Fetch data for users with ajax but show it without ajax for Google

[vivekrathore]

Hi,

We have a thematic footer which shows similar pages links relevant to the search criteria made on a page.

We want to fetch those footer similar links through ajax when users search on site but the links will be shown without using ajax when Google fetches those pages. We want to do this to improve our page load time.

The links content & count will be exactly same in both cases whether Google fetches the search pages or user fetches those pages. Will this be treated as negative by Google, Can this have any negative affect on our rankings or traffic.

Regards,

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

How many seconds would the impact be for Google if you would still load it via AJAX? It feels a bit like you're trying to fix something that ain't broken.

[max.favilli]

Cloaking is very dangerous, and the most common reason for google to use his axe.

If you code has anything similar to if googlebot then, you are at risk.

But in this case you do have a solution which theoretically should have no negative effect. Google has been sponsoring that technique of serving a static content on first load and update it with ajax.

But let me stress what it means, serve static content on first load, and update with ajax. Which means no cloaking, don't serve a different content (neither different code with same looking content) to visitors than google bot.

Additionally, it is very important to please visitors and serve content fast to them, but at the same time it's important to serve content fast to googlebot, since speed is a ranking factor.

[AlanMosley]

if you are going to load data for google on page load, then you will still have the load times. so loading links again using ajax is not solving anything.

[vivekrathore]

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for a quick reply.

This will reduce around 1 second in page load time.

[AlanMosley]

1 second is a lot for a few links even a lot of links. maybe your server technology has problems.

But still you have the problem of load time no matter who you are downloading the links for, the search engine or the use, they still have to be downloaded.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I'm with Alan on the server side, 1 second is not really good for just doing a request for some links.