Nick Wilson at ClickInfluence  noted USA Today's recent Social Media Enhancements, based on AJAX and JavaScript, aren't really Search Friendly and may not always be crawl able by Search Engines.

Specifically, he was going after the "long tail" effect new features such of user profiles on USA Today (totally long tail - a lot of good content that people create that could rank in Search Engines) that are hardly indexed at all due to the technology used to create those profiles.

Now, it's possible that, in time, Google will index many more profiles but as of today, March 16th, 2006,  only 9 profiles on USA Today are indexed by Google.  But, according to PaidContent.org, USAToday.com Pulling 5,000 Daily New Members (meaning 5000 new profiles a day). 

"…USAToday.com readers are creating as many as 5,000 profiles every day since the site relaunched last week with a strong social networking, user connections focus. “The people are reacting, everyone is thrilled,” said SVP Jeff Webber. “We’ve got some consumers that liked the old design and tell us we’ve gone too far. But 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people a day are creating personae, commenting and coming in. We’re five days deep.”
Webber told me last night that many old-time readers had complained about the re-design. Lots of parallels here with Netscape’s revival, a year ago this week, as a user-submitted news aggregation platform. Ironically, many old-school Netscape users harnessed just that platform on launch day to grumble loudly about the changes. But USA Today can take heart - its features don’t hand over all the keys to the readers, and USAToday.com is still clearly a content creator, not just an aggregator.
“It’s five days old and … it’s not [just] an experiment,” Webber added in a Q&A session this morning. “Users can come in and create personae, comment on every story, produce and submit content and give us things. But the social media part is only one part - the other part is letting the outside in. "

It does not seem like letting the "outside in" includes Search Engine Crawlers.  I'm sure it's not done on purpose and eventually, I believe, Google will find a way to index all the profiles - or maybe USA Today needs to do something…. something to help that along (ie: a sitemap, flat file, or series of flat files that are crawl-able with the urls and metadata of each profile - or perhaps even an XML Feed back in to the Search Engines with the data that is being obscured by the AJAX/JavaScript technology being employed to create the profiles).

Having said that….. the issue with AJAX and crawl-ability is a red flag to some upcoming website redesigns that I know of - and it's something every large corporate site ought to look at.  In may cases, in the rush to get things out (that are often behind schedule) elements of new site re-design are not tested well enough - or at all.

It reminds me of the old days when I worked at what was Dow Jones/Telerate in the mid 90's.  Every so often, Dow Jones would put out new stock quote / research projects without really having time to QA them or even fully test them.  Many times, new features that are being rolled out are not tested….at all - perhaps they can't even be fully tested.

Point being…. you may want to include a plan to make sure new features are indexable by Search Engines, as part of the roll out, and if they're not, put in workarounds (there are always workarounds) as part of the plan. 

Social Media using Ajax / Flash / JavaScript, etc - can be Search Engine Friendly with the right workarounds (even though AJAX/Flash and JavaScript are not Search Friendly at this time)….. you just have to plan for it - make room for a search testing component of whatever you're going to roll out.