Google and Ajax

We can hear and there that Google might soon index the ajax content in your website.

How?

Actually, in most of url, you can have an # (hash), which is traditionally used as an anchor (an internal link in your webpage) eg.: www.myswebsite.com/manual.html#overview will send you the overview part of the page called manual.html.

But with the use of Ajax, very often, when you have a # in your url, it is for ajax to execute one of the parameters included in the javascript (js).

For, Google tells developers to use #! instead of # to allow the search engine to interpret this as ajax, and not as an anchor.

Cool! Does it mean my full ajax website content will be ranked in Google?

Calm down and relax, this is not as easy as it appears for:

1. Developers will have to modify all of their ajax scripts first
2. The content sent to Google must be interpreted as html, but this job, Google says, has to be done by the server of the website, which means that every website will need a headless browser, which means that:
   1. Developers will have to implement one on your website (which is costy and takes time)
   2. You will need a big bandwidth to interpret the ajax content (since it has to read the ajax content, transform it in valid html, and send it to the search engine)
3. For Google asks the websites to interpret the ajax content for him (it would need for Google too many server capabilities to calculate it by their own), webmasters will be able to make fake contents: one for a human reader, one for a robot reader; which might creates troubles.

the good news anyway is to know that Google is trying to find a solution for indexing ajax website, but long is the way before it is really working.

(Besides, Google already knows some pieces of javascript...)