Here is yet another update on when Google will really be killing off the AJAX crawling scheme from 2009. Google announced its death in 2015 but then gave it a date of Q2 of 2018 last year and continued to tell us it is on the chopping block.
It is not dead yet, Google still will crawl pages with ?_escaped_fragment_= URLs but John Mueller from Google said he'd expect it to go away sooner rather than later in their estimate of Q2 2018, which is now. The issue is, it doesn't seem Google killed it off yet.
While Gary Illyes from Google said on Twitter that it is no longer working. John Mueller didn't say that on Twitter - he said it is coming.
Here is how Gary responded:
Yup
— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) May 23, 2018
Here is how John responded:
Are you still using it? The plan is to stop crawling the ?_escaped_fragment_= URLs and just to render the #! URLs directly, but better would be to just move away from that URL pattern completely.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 24, 2018
The team has been asking me "can we finally turn it off now?" for a while, so I'd assume we'll switch over completely sooner rather than later. Make sure your #! pages render well with the mobile-friendly-test, test all your templates.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 24, 2018
So it should be really soon but it doesn't seem it is dead just yet?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
