SEO4Ajax Companion allows testing the Google Ajax Scheme implementation directly in your browser.
You can install SEO4Ajax Companion through the Chrome web store or load the unpacked extension as described here.
- Open the URL of any website implementing the Google Ajax Scheme specification.
- The extension checks that the website is respecting the specification and appends the query parameter
_escaped_fragment_=to the URL if so. - The extension disables JavaScript so you can preview exactly what compliant bots see, in your browser.
- The color of the extension icon turns to green
meaning the snapshot of the page has been properly served.
- You can have an overview on how bots are crawling the website by navigating through its inner links. During the navigation, the extension will append automatically the
_escaped_fragment_=query parameter and the icon status will be updated. - Click on the icon to enable/disable the extension. When disabled, the extension icon stays gray
and a badge labelled "off" is displayed above the icon. - Go to the options page (via the contextual menu of extension icon) to set the user-agent used when downloading snapshots.
- When enabled, the color of the extension icon will be gray if the extension is not active (e.g. on chrome://* pages).
The extension doesn't append the _escaped_fragment_= query parameter to the URL. The color of the extension icon stays black 
.
The cause can vary depending on how the website implements the Google Ajax Scheme specification:
- If the website is using the History API to handle navigation, then make sure that the
<meta name="fragment" content="!">tag is present in the<head>of the page. - If the website is relying on the fragment identifier to handle navigation, then make sure that fragments begin with #! (e.g. #!home instead of #home).
This indicates that the page is correctly implementing the Google Ajax Scheme specification but the snapshot content is almost identical (orange) or identical (red) to the page served without the _escaped_fragment_= parameter.
- If the displayed page content is complete, this could mean there is no need to implement the Google Ajax Scheme specification.
- If the displayed page is partially rendered or empty then it probably means the server is not able to provide the snapshot of the page. You can also check that the user-agent is not blocked by the server and change it if needed in the options page.
The orange color may also mean that there was an HTTP error (e.g. 4xx or 5xx status code) during the download of the snapshot.
Please contact us at [email protected]. We will do our best to fix your issue.