Google says AJAX crawler is dead again
The AJAX exploration scheme has like nine lives, it has died many deaths but it keeps coming back. The latest, John Mueller of Google said last week on Twitter that “we ditched support for AJAX crawling some time ago, and now just index / render #! URL directly.” But just a reminder, he died in 2015, 2017, 2018 and in 2020 he still lived, a bit. You just can’t kill the power of hashbangs.
In short, avoid relying on the AJAX parsing scheme, it is really outdated, just look at the disclaimer at the top of this page. It has been officially deprecated since around 2015, but Google has managed to continue to access its content since then, as it dies its own death.
Here are John’s recent tweets on the AJAX Crawling scheme:
We ditched support for AJAX crawling a while ago, and now just index / render #! URL directly. Redirecting and canonicalization are good practices to clean this up, but it can be good to dig links that go there too (sometimes they are internal and can easily be fixed).
– ð Jean ð (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021
It has been obsolete for a number of years now, I do not have the actual date on hand.
– ð Jean ð (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021
You can see that Google is still trying to access these URLs, but John said, âThese numbers are really small and the SEO effect is basically zero (it’s the same content, just the URL # !, So c is more of a cleaning than an improvement. “
Looking at this graph, I would run an analysis on it, fix the internal links, and let it be. Those numbers are really small and the SEO effect is essentially zero (it’s the same content, just the #! URL, so it’s more of a cleanup than an improvement).
– ð Jean ð (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.