Google crawl ajax / dynamically generated content - SEO

Question

I've got a very unique situation that I don't believe any of the other topics here can relate.

I have a ecommerce module that is dynamically loaded / embedded into third party sites, no iframe straight JSON to web client into content. I have no access to these third part sites at all, other then my javascript file being loaded from their page and dynamically generating the content.

I'm aware of the #! method, but that's no good here, my JS does generate "urls" within the embedded platform, but they're fake and for the address bar only, and I don't believe google crawlers can reach this far.

So my question is, is there a meta that we can set to point outside the url to i.e. back to my server with static crawlable content. I.e. pointing the canonical to my server... but again I don't think that would work.

Answer 1

If you implement #! then you have to make sure the url your embedded in supports the fragment parameter versions, which you probably can't. It's server side stuff.

You probably can't influence the canonical tag of the page either. It again has to be done server side. Any meta tag you set via JavaScript will not be seen by a bot.

Disqus solved the problem by providing an API so the embedding websites could get there comments server side and render then in plain html. WordPress has a plugin to do this. Disqus are also one of the few systems that Google has worked out how to crawl their AJAX pages.

Some plugins request people to also include a plain link with the JavaScript. Be careful with this as you may break Google Guidelines if you do it wrong. But you may be able to integrate the plain link with your plugin so that it directs bots and users to a crawlable version of the content.

Answer 2

Look into Google's crawlable ajax standard (and why it's a bad idea) and canonical URLs.

Answer 3

Now you can actually do this. A complete guide and examples can be found here: https://github.com/kubrickology/Logical-escaped_fragment