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I'm running multiple feeds of loops on my homepage much like youtube.com and I want to use AJAX to load them instead of tabbed content with jQuery. Since most of my traffic comes from posts I'd like to know how it impacts my site with Google with less crawlable links and excerpts.

My question is this: How bad is it for my SEO to use AJAX to load the feeds on my homepage? Each feed contains links to new posts in different categories and I have 10 of them so loading them with jQuery Tabs adds load time but makes it all crawlable.

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  • What is the question?
    – artlung
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 1:15
  • Sorry my question is how bad is it for my seo to use ajax to load the feeds on my homepage like youtube.com. Each feed contains links to new posts in different categories and I have 10 of them so loading them with jquery tabs ads load time but makes it all crawlable.
    – Pollux Khafra
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 4:18
  • I've updated your question. Do any of the questions in this search: webmasters.stackexchange.com/search?q=ajax+seo apply?
    – artlung
    Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 11:06

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That content probably won't be crawlable since it is loaded via Ajax and with the exception of Google's Crawlable Ajax spec, which you are not using, isn't search engine friendly. However, just by having that content produced via Ajax won't hurt your SEO efforts. It's ok to have dynamic content produced by JavaScript as long as you aren't doing it to manipulate the search results. You clearly aren't in this case. That content just won't help you like it might if you used jQuery tabs and made it crawlable to the search engines.

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Isn't the AJAX simply loading html into your page? So it's not like the search engines won't recognize the content.

Having dynamic content on your home page isn't new or bad. As you pointed out youtube.com as well as Digg.com are constantly updating their content and plenty of other sites for that matter.

It's actually good to have fresh content on your home page they'll recognize the page as being updated recently and begin crawling it more. That may or may not affect your rankings but they should crawl it more often with fresh content.

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  • It's not all being loading with the page load. I have a feed section and then tabs that you can click to load the different loops into it. I don't think I can use google's ajax solution with that since I'm not actually changing a page when feeds are switched. I'm not sure using ajax helps with keeping the page fresh as they are being updated anyway but it does keep from loading 100 thumb images at once using jquery tabs and that's what I want to save. Is there a way I can still make the other content crawled somehow?
    – Pollux Khafra
    Commented Mar 7, 2012 at 0:33
  • What if you created some other pages on your site that displayed the content statically and updated every so often then add those page links into your sitemap? Can you give your sites URL?
    – Anagio
    Commented Mar 7, 2012 at 5:52
  • Im using wordpress so what Im doing now is making pages that are just the loop structure I want to include the feed section. My problem with that is they are just unstyled pages that show a list of posts and don't want them getting indexed with google and people landing on them unstyled.
    – Pollux Khafra
    Commented Mar 7, 2012 at 6:02
  • So you have custom templates created with the loop. You're making pages and setting the pages templates to the custom ones you made which are not styled? Do you want them to keep the same style as your WP theme? If so you should view a template that came with your theme. Typically they have some custom header and footer functions. Copy one then just edit the body/main content area to use your loop and style it as needed.
    – Anagio
    Commented Mar 7, 2012 at 6:06
  • Or to prevent those specific pages from being indexed check out this post yoast.com/wordpress-noindex-specific-posts-and-pages
    – Anagio
    Commented Mar 7, 2012 at 6:08

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