: When creating HTML for _escaped_fragment_ AJAX pages, how correct does it have to be? I have a javascript heavy site (It really couldn't be coded in any sensible way with progressive enhancement)

@Jamie184

I thought I'd answer my own question now that I have some experience of coding such a system. It seems that having a rough approximation is sufficient. The solution I have coded:


delivers very
similar (but not identical) markup
(by this I mean not all attributes
are always populated)
about 80% of
the same content appears (the crawled
version is a strict subset of the
user version)
The content, while the
same, is ordered differently


Google now seems to have indexed over 2000 of my pages now, and we are seeing real (yet very small at this point in time) search traffic.

I have posted more details on my blog at blog.dansingerman.com if anyone is interested.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Welton855

The contents should be equivalent. Optimally, you would want to render the page using a browser exactly like a user would see it. Practically, there will always be differences, as there are differences when rendering the same page in different browsers.

At any rate, there's no easy measure for "close enough" when it comes to comparing different web-pages, so it's not like someone could say "90%" is good enough :-). I would recommend making sure that all of the content is visible appropriately and that the (visible & semantic) structure of the page matches the page as it would be viewed by a user. You should aim to provide the same level as you would use to render Flash-content in HTML for AJAX-crawling.

Vote Up Vote Down