AJAX for SEO Considered Harmful

"Here at Oneupweb, our development team has been playing around with AJAX Development on some of our internal web sites. Now, to help alleviate any confusion, in this context AJAX is di fferent from Ajax™ the cleaning product. Here, AJAX stands for “Asyncronous Javascript And XmlHTTPRequest”, which is a somewhat young web development technology that allows the construction of highly interactive websites that can help to reduce server load. If used incorrectly, AJAX techniques can actually hinder a search spider’s ability to find indexable information on web pages. AJAX’s problems lie in its powerful capability to use javascript to pull data from the server as needed. Unlike browsers, search engine spiders don’t speak javascript. As such, if the data isn’t in the page then the spider won’t index it. This means that if you are loading your product reviews using AJAX, then even though your customers will see “cool widget” in your page, searches for “cool widget” in the engines won’t lead to your pages, and you’ll lose in the SERPs." Source: straightupsearch.com