The AJAX crawling schema has like nine lives, it has died many deaths but has kept coming back. The latest, John Mueller of Google said last week on Twitter that "we dropped support for AJAX crawling a while ago, and now just index / render #! URLs directly." But just a reminder, it died in 2015, 2017, 2018 and in 2020 it still lived on, a bit. You just can't kill the power of hashbangs.
In short, stay away from depending on the AJAX Crawling scheme, it is really deprecated just look at the disclaimer at the top of this page. It has officially been deprecated since 2015 or so, but Google has managed to continue to access content on it since then as it dies its own death.
Here are the recent tweets from John on the AJAX Crawling scheme:
We dropped support for AJAX crawling a while ago, and now just index / render #! URLs directly. Redirecting & canonical are good practices to clean that up, but it can be good to dig up links going there too (sometimes they're internal & can easily be fixed).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021
It's been deprecated for a number of years now, I don't have the actual date off-hand.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021
You may see Google try to access these URLs still but John said "Those numbers are really small, and the SEO effect is essentially zero (it's the same content, just the #! URL, so it's more of a cleanup than an improvement."
Looking at that graph, I'd run a crawl over it, fix the internal links, and let it be. Those numbers are really small, and the SEO effect is essentially zero (it's the same content, just the #! URL, so it's more of a cleanup than an improvement).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 27, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
