Asynchronous loading of product prices bad for SEO?

[jef2220]

We are currently looking into improving our TTFB on our ecommerce site.

A huge improvement would be to asynchronously load the product prices on the product list pages. The product detail page – on which the product is ordered- will be left untouched.

The idea is that all content like product data, images and other static content is sent to the browser first(first byte). The product prices depend on a set of user variables like delivery location, vat inclusive/exclusive,… etc. So they would requested via an ajax call to reduce the TTFB.

My question is whether google considers this as black hat SEO or not?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Definitely not black hat but could impact SEO and negate any schema markup you have.

I would go to GWT > Crawl > Fetch as Google and see what HTML is received by Googlebot.

If all the async elements are there, you should be gravy.

[TomRayner]

I don't see any reason why this would be seen as black hat.  On the contrary, I see it as an unintuitive UX idea and you should definitely do it.

The only information your withholding (and you're not even cloaking it) is a price that is dependent on a lot of factors.  You're not hiding any content or links, so there's no worry there.  Even if you were hiding content it wouldn't be a problem, unless it was completely irrelevant and there just to rank the page.

Any affect this could have is that if you're deferring elements to load on the page to improve Time To First Byte, then Google may not read them as they crawl and therefore the content it sees on the page may be depleted, affecting your ability to rank the page.  But for something like deferring a price tag, this isn't relevant at all.

I'd say go for it - think it would be a great idea for user experience.

[jef2220]

Thanks for your response. We'll definitely go for this improvement.

But can you please explain what you mean by "an unintuitive UX idea" ?