Is it possible to delay google crawler a set time or until ajax has loaded?

Question

This is such a long shot, I doubt it is possible, but you guys will know better than me.

Is it possible to flag a page so that google won't take an immediate snapshot, but will delay for x seconds after the load event, so that I can give my ajax content time to load and be indexed?

I know I can use the hashbang url and send html snapshots that way, but it would be so much easier to just delay the crawler from taking an index of the page until 3 seconds had passed or similar.

Answer 1

You have to keep in mind that search engines are not going to execute any javascript code in your page.

As suggested google has started to execute javascript code in order to get facebook, twitter and discus comments in pages.

So since google's javascript code execution is limited and google is not the only search engine out there you should consider other options.

You could look around for google's (and other crawlers) ip address and when a request is coming from that ip, serve it a static snapshot of your page or a dynamic but not ajax version of your site.

Phantomjs is a headless browser. You can use it to create static snapshots of your pages.

Answer 2

Take a look at the Google tutorial on how to make your AJAX content crawlable

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/