I just read an interesting post by Stephen Spencer in which he takes a look at the SEO side of progressive enhancement.

When a site is developed with the lowest common denominator approach (minimal viewing requirements) and then enhanced in a way that degrades acceptably if the viewer disables advanced scripting on their browser is called progressive enhancement (or shorter PE as used by some). This design and development approach is usually used for the sake of accessibility, but it also has some implications for SEO, even though it really comes down to do you load your content dynamically (after a certain browser event - click, hover…) or do you load all relevant content all at once. Stephen’s post shows a good example of how a page should degrade well when JavaScript (thus AJAX) is turned off, but this is still more an argument for usability, unless the content is loaded dynamically after the page has initially loaded, which indeed could present a serious SEO issue.

It’s not a good idea to load potentially SEO useful content to a page dynamically (through AJAX), thus “hiding” it from the search engines, especially if the content is relevant and specific to the page in question. Using Flash for showing content is also something that has been known to be bad practice for a while now, and should be avoided, unless of course you rely on sources of traffic other than search engines. Best workaround is a mixed page (Flash and HTML), with plenty of good links to level the content deficit. Instead, both AJAX and Flash should be used moderately and all the content that may be interesting to search engines in terms of defining the specific topic of a page (assuming it’s useful for the visitors first and foremost), should be presented using plain old HTML. This way a page will have all the content easily readable by both humans and search engine spiders, and will most likely be taken into consideration as a good result for a search query related to the page’s topic.

Here’s a mind breaker - if you have content that’s initially hidden but accessible through the UI through whatever advanced page control layer (DHTML, Javascript, whatever) and than the content becomes inaccessible (invisible) with scripting turned off, does it qualify for the hidden content penalty from the search engines? In other words, if the content is only accessible by humans through the UI and not the search engines (they can’t determine what to click visually), and is otherwise hidden, will the site be penalized?

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