Sigh, Google-only websites.
_escaped_fragment_ is a stupid hack that requires hardest bit of work needed for progressive enhancement, but provides none of the benefit.
_escaped_fragment_ is a stupid hack that requires hardest bit of work needed for progressive enhancement, but provides none of the benefit.
You are right about one thing, it is a pain to setup. Much harder than it sounds at first. After doing it a few times, I finally got sick of it and built http://www.BromBone.com. It's a service that takes generates the html snapshots for site owners and keeps them up to date. I hope it will let site owner keep all the positives and eliminate most of the new negatives.
And if you use html5 pushstate you could even serve the HTML captures to any bots. Eventually you also could easily add graceful degradation to your site serving snapshots for non js users. As of PoC for SEO4Ajax (http://www.seo4ajax.com), I built this application (http://www.appscharts.me) illustrating this purpose.
I've never seen an example where Google crawled a page and included content that was loaded via ajax or an external javascript file. I have seen Google index content that is loaded from a script tag included in the html page.
However, from working with customers of BromBone, I know this. People have javascript powered webpages that were not getting indexed by Google. Google would crawl the page, and see no content. The pages were not in Google. After creating prerendered snapshots and serving them when the _escaped_fragment_ parameter was present, the pages showed up in Google.
Asking Timmy to "step up his game" is heartless, and it'd be unnecessary if we were better citizens.