A couple year ago, Google released best practices on how to make AJAX crawlable for search engines. But as I covered last week at Search Engine Land, those guidelines may go away.

Gary Illyes said at SMX West last week that Google may announce they no longer will support those recommendations and will come out with a blog post as soon as now (but it seems likely it won’t happen till later) explaining why. In fact, I believe (I can be wrong) that Gary said sites designed in AJAX provide a poor user experience to users and implied to me (I can be wrong) that it is almost as bad as going with Adobe Flash (okay that might be an exaggeration).

So I decided to ask John Mueller about that since I am getting a lot of questions around what will Google announce around AJAX. I asked him at 7:03 mark in the Google+ video hangout and he said:

So it seems like Google is going to say that don’t bother with those recommendations anymore. Google should be able to crawl advanced JavaScript, like AJAX, just fine. But keep these following things in mind – although I am not sure what those things will be.

When will Google announce this? Gary Illyes from Google did comment in another Google+ thread saying “That’s still in works, Barry Schwartz. We still need to figure out a few things.”

Here is the video at the start time of the question:

Forum discussion at Google+.