Jay got me on IM with a question a little while ago.  He’s working on the marketing end of a soon to launch web 2.0 project, and had a question about how his engineers are managing pagination.

It’s got the look of just about any other pagination scheme, little arrows pointing right and left at either end, with the page numbers with hyperlinks at the bottom…you know 1 2 3 4 5 …9.

The problem is this: the developer who worked on that particular bit of code decided it would be very cool to use AJAX (asynchronous javascript and XML) to code that.  It would have been easy enough to do in the regular code base, without any worry of page refreshes, but, heck, AJAX is cool.  Jay correctly identified this as a potential problem.

“Am I crazy?  I think this is death to us for SEO (search engine optimization),”  He asked.

Not only is he not crazy, he’s quite astute.  Google and the main search engines don’t process javascript, so they won’t be seeing his page links.  If Google doesn’t see the links, then the information isn’t going to be indexed. 

Be sure you’re technology isn’t getting in the way of your search engine optimization plan!