Any experience with getting a pure ajax site onto search engines?
We’re thinking of creating a “no script” version of our site that creates a massive directory of all of our content… and that will automatically redirect to our js version by default…. good enough?
@veribookauthorJun 29.2010 — #Thanks for the suggestion.... I think we're going to do it, although now we're trying to figure out how to deal with search engine caching. At the moment, we let users publish/unpublish stuff in realtime, but the moment a third party get's involved and caches published content that the user later wants to unpublish, we have a problem...
@CharlesJun 29.2010 — #See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitemaps . But do keep in mind that there quite a lot of people, such as myself, who eschew JavaScript. One option is to provide an XML sitemap with an XSLT stylesheet that transforms the map to something more commodious to humans.
@Inferno_str1keJul 26.2010 — #One of my first major projects (and still continuing to this day) was [url=http://sturents.com]StuRents.com[/url] which is a student property website. When I initially wrote the front page search (now the second page since it is active in multiple towns) it was pure AJAX - without JS the buttons just did nothing. To combat this I had a sitemap list every single property and landlord anyway, but the search engines didn't seem too keen on that because they couldn't go anywhere except the sitemap (and user account pages) from the home page.
About a year ago I decided to change this and wrote out all the buttons as actual page links, which would load the page exactly as if the user has searched with AJAX. This meant that Google now had lots of links to follow on the front page, meaning the actual search results got indexed, as well as the properties they linked to. Not only this, but writing it this way made me realise a lot of inefficiencies in the way the AJAX method worked. I rewrote the AJAX based on the new non-AJAX version and now its about twice as fast. Proof that progressive enhancement is the way to go, and not to jump in with AJAX before the site works without - it benefits site structure as well as your SEO.