Will AJAX cause my site to have high bounce rates and hurt my rankings?
I am creating an art gallery website that updates its images via AJAX, for those with javascript enabled, not multiple page load requests. I guess it will look like my site has a high bounce rate. I understand that search engines won't be able to index dynamic content, but would such a misunderstood bounce rate affect my search engine rankings, even if I have a lot of returned visitors?
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The short answer is no.
The failure rate (although relevant here) is the least of your concerns. Concern about content on the page. Search engines are much better at reading dynamic content than they used to be.
If your site is 100% dynamic ajax ... you might be in trouble. IF this is just a gallery you will be fine IMO. Use nice titles on pages, text on pages, alt tags, etc ... let the spiders read a lot.
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I am using GWT on my website penwag.com and have been using an approach for some time where it was almost 100% AJAX. I recently made an update (see http://penwag.blogspot.com/2010/04/april-penwag-update.html) mainly to change who is in the driver's seat. Now basic navigation is controlled by HTML, there is much more HTML content there than before. This helps in several ways. First, search engines have more options to work with. Secondly, navigation is easier. Third, separation of concerns is easier to achieve since each page is its own module. Fourth, the integration with third party tools is smoother. Things that particularly touched penwag.com are Google Ads integration and Google Friend Connect integration. This is probably the case for most gadgets: they are designed to be embedded in HTML, and embedding them in a GWT component is more difficult.
Some of what I said here are specific to GWT, but many of them are correct regardless of the AJAX framework used.
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