[eurokc98]

Gary Illyes @goog said this was happening Q1 this year, and like others mentioned lots of other direct/indirect signals have pointed this way.

http://searchengineland.com/google-may-discontinue-ajax-craw... March 5th: Gary said you may see a blog post at the Google Webmaster Blog as soon as next week announcing the decommissioning of these guidelines.

Pure speculation but interesting... The timing may have something to do with Wix, a Google Domains partner, who is having difficulty with their customer sites being indexed. The support thread shows a lot of talk around "we are following Google's Ajax guidelines so this must be a problem with Google". John Mueller is active in that thread so it's not out of the realm of possibility someone was asked to make a stronger public statement. http://searchengineland.com/google-working-on-fixing-problem...

[nostrademons]

I'm betting that they finally solved the scalability problems with headless WebKit. Google's been able to index JS since about 2010, but when I left in 2014, you couldn't rely on this for anything but the extreme head of the site distribution because they could only run WebKit/V8 on a limited subset of sites with the resources they had available. Either they got a whole bunch more machines devoted to indexing or they figured out how to speed it up significantly.

[tracker1]

I'd say both are pretty likely.. another round of lower-power servers with potentially more cores... more infrastructure... Combined with improvements in headless rendering pipelines. I haven't looked into it in well over a year now, but last I checked dynamic updates took about 2-3 days to get discovered vs. server-delivered being hours for a relatively popular site.

I'm guessing they've likely cut this time in half through a combination of additional resources, and performance improvements. Wondering if they'd be willing to push this out as something better than PhantomJS... probably not as it's a pretty big competative advantage.

I know MS has been doing JS rendering for a few years, they show up in analytics traffic (big time if you change your routing scheme on a site with lots of routes, will throw off your numbers).