In 2015 Google said they would deprecate the AJAX crawling schema and then in 2017, two years later, Google did do that. A year after that, Google said they stopped crawling #! for the most part. But today, in 2020, Google said technically they still do #1 crawling.
John Mueller of Google said on Twitter "for the moment, we would still support it," it being #1 crawling. "But since we've flagged it as deprecated so long ago, I wouldn't assume that it'll stick around forever," he added. Yea, do not go building new sites on this framework:
Here are those tweets:
For the moment, we would still support it, but since we've flagged it as deprecated so long ago, I wouldn't assume that it'll stick around forever. I wouldn't build new sites around this, I'd try to make that more sustainable.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 12, 2020
Then Google went on about why is it not documented that Google technically still crawls these?
I've been in favor of documenting things that we support, even if we explicitly don't recommend them anymore, but I could see how folks might see that as "oh, it's fine to use" ... Should we disavow all knowledge of #! URLs? Email all #! sites? Curious to hear your thoughts.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 12, 2020
Yeah, we try to keep old technology supported as much as we can, but that doesn't make it a reasonable alternative for when you're setting up something new :). Build for the long run, especially when it comes to URL structures.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 13, 2020
Just an interesting tidbit I thought some of you might appreciate. I do not recommend you build sites that depend on that old AJAX crawling schema. I honestly thought by now it would not be supported at all.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Update in 2021: I am not sure when unofficial support was removed, but it may have been?
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
