In early March, I reported that Google may want to kill off AJAX like they did with Flash. Well, that is wrong, their goal is not to kill of AJAX but rather to kill off their special method for developers to help GoogleBot crawl and understand AJAX.
Andrew Shotland asked Google's Gary Illyes about this on Twitter last night and Gary explained that they are still working on it. In short, Google is testing to make sure their new recommendations work but the goal is not to kill off AJAX web sites, but rather just the _escaped_fragment_ AJAX crawl specification.
Here are some more revealing snippets from Gary Illyes of Google:
@localseoguide we are going to publish a post on this in the near future, but first we need to test that our new recommendation works
— Gary Illyes (@methode) April 28, 2015@thebcco @localseoguide correct, there will likely be a deprecation period to let people move away safely.
— Gary Illyes (@methode) April 28, 2015The confusion over will Google kill off crawling AJAX? Google say no way!
@thebcco @localseoguide what do you mean no replacement? You only need to care about the JS part and we'll figure out the indexing
— Gary Illyes (@methode) April 28, 2015Gary explains just the special method Google originally had to better crawl AJAX, that will no longer be needed:
@thebcco but that is about deprecating ?escaped_fragment, not support for ajax as a whole https://t.co/ItccCbgcMt
— Gary Illyes (@methode) April 28, 2015Forum discussion at Twitter.
