Google has formally announced it is no longer recommending a proposal issued in 2009 related to AJAX crawling.
Six years ago, making AJAX pages crawlable was proposed as a solution to Google’s inability to understand and interpret JavaScript.
Since then, Google has developed the ability to crawl CSS and JavaScript by rendering how a human visitor would see it — provided its not being blocked by robots.txt. This has led to Google deprecating its AJAX crawling scheme.
Google has renounced the recommendations made in its 2009 proposal, recommending instead that developers follow the principles of progressive enhancement.
Kazushi Nagayama, Search Quality Analyst at Google, goes on to answer a series of questions, assuring that sites following Google’s previous recommendations would still be index.
Nagayama goes on to recommend following best practices whenever possible — while adding that if your current setup is working then no immediate change is needed.
In general, Google recommends against serving pre-rendered pages using JavaScript framework. However, if your website does this, at the very least make sure the content being served to Google crawlers and the content being served to human visitors is the same.
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