In May, we reported that by the end of Q2 the AJAX crawling scheme will be going away. Well, Q2 has come and gone and has it gone away completely? The answer seems to be no.
John Mueller from Google said on Twitter this morning "for the most part, we've switched to rendering pages with #! instead of using the ?_escaped_fragment_= versions." But he said they still have "Some have direct links too, so crawling them won't immediately stop." So it is not like they are cutting it off 100% completely, I guess?
For the most part, we've switched to rendering pages with #! instead of using the ?_escaped_fragment_= versions (some have direct links too, so crawling them won't immediately stop).
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) July 6, 2018
The AJAX crawling scheme from 2009 was dying since 2015 but then gave it a date of Q2 of 2018 last year and continued to tell us it is on the chopping block.
So it is not 100% clear if it is completely dead or not, I suspect if you try it, Google might still crawl it?
Anyone want to give it a try?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
