“You no longer need to do anything special for hash-bang URLs,” Google’s John Mueller said on the September 17 edition of #AskGoogleWebmasters, “we’ll just try to render them directly.”
Here is a question that was asked during the September 17 episode by Twitter user, @olegko – “What is the current status of #! AJAX crawling? How do I set up redirects?”
According to the answer stated above, webmasters won’t have to take any special action for Google to crawl their AJAX applications.
“The AJAX crawling scheme was something we proposed in the early days of JavaScript sites, way back in 2009,” Mueller contextualized. “This worked great for a number of years, but over time, it became kind of redundant. Search engines — or at least, Google — had learned how to render most pages like a browser would. And, in the meantime, we’re even using a special version of Chrome for crawling and rendering.”
“In order to move to a different URL structure, you need to use JavaScript on these pages to create the redirects,” he added. “It’s not possible to use server-side redirects since everything after a hash — so, the number symbol — is not sent to the server, but rather processed in the browser. Once you’ve set up those redirects, as Googlebot reprocesses the hash-bang URLs on the site, it’ll spot the redirect and follow it appropriately.”
If you’re curious and want to learn more, check out these resources to give you a better idea of how Googlebot handles your interactive pages and applications.
- Google testing tools now support evergreen Googlebot
- Evergreen Googlebot with Chromium rendering engine: What technical SEOs need to know
- Googlebot renders, indexes AJAX-style dynamic content driven by XHR POST
- Google adds JavaScript SEO basics to its Search developer’s guide
- How to measure success with JavaScript-dependent websites