I'm a relative newbie to programming (less than a year), and am having
my first experience with submitting a site for indexing. Like many
others, I find the grace and functionality of AJAX very appealing, but
have run into the search engine problem associated with it.

A brief summary of the problem:
     1. AJAX loaded content is not indexed by google.
     2. Creating a duplicate site or content for indexing purposes is
BAD.

Solutions I Have Read About:
     1. Do not use AJAX for loading static content.
     2. Be willing to not have your content indexed, and still use
AJAX.

Considerations:
     1. Provide access for non-JS enabled browsers.

My Solution:

I have a PHP driven site utilizing a main index.php with a dynamic
content div. (IE the div doesn't have anything in it when the page is
initially loaded).

On JQuery's document.ready or any other necessary event handler,
static content is called from the server via AJAX and loaded into the
dynamic div.

Here is the heart of my solution: The actual content is completely
formatted as an HTML document, including a DTD. In fact, the content
independently validates as XHTML 1.0 strict.

Within the head section, I place a JS function fired on document.ready
which determines if the browser window is at the index.php href. If it
is, then nothing happens. If the browser isn't at that location, it
loads the index.php page and passes a parameter to load the
appropriate dynamic content.

When the page is loaded, the content displays correctly within the
dynamic div.

Of course, if the user (or the robot) does not have JS enabled,
nothing at all happens and they view the content page in a simple HTML
format.

All of the dynamic content pages are made available through an HTML
sitemap for users and an XML sitemap for search engines. Here is the
relevant JS code:

<code>

// the showWhat parameter is the filename of the content, for instance
homework.html .

function showMe(showWhat) {

 if (window.locatiuon.href != "http://website.com/index.php") {

    window.location.href = "http://website.com/index.php";

    showContent(showWhat);

  }

  //using JQuery
  //#dynamic content is the id of the div

  $('#dynamic_content').load(whatContent);

Here is my question:

Is there any reason this is not a viable, acceptable method of using
AJAX with static content? It is indexable, it does not duplicate
content, and the content can be viewed by people that do not have JS
enabled.

I tested this on:

Firefox 2/3
IE 6/7
Safari 3
Netscape 9
Opera 9
Konqueror 3

Thanks for any answers/comments/suggestions/improvements. Keep in mind
I'm a newb.

Regards,

Mad Mouser

.

One thing that does concern me though...
you mention that all content is avaialbe through use of a Sitemap.

So... you go to Site.com... it laods up with naff bar a link to the
sitemap...
Are you going to use it... or go to a completely different site?

.

Another thing to consider...
If oyu are using such 'dynmic' content... how are the URLs going to
work out?
How are people to bookmark/link?

.

Of course, the previous 2 points are moot/redundant if your system
loads 'normal' content... only if JS is not enabled.

On Jun 23, 12:10 pm, Autocrat wrote:

If I was a user w/o JS enabled, and the site links were not readily
apparent to me, I would probably move on to a different site. However,
I make two caveats on that: 1. Less than 5% of global users do not
have JS enabled (which doesn't change anything, they should still have
access to that content). 2. I wonder how many of those non-JS enabled
users are using text-only browsers such as lynx? If they are, then the
site map link is readily apparent and accessible, as it is one of only
three links on the index.php. Between these two factors, I am thinking
that it strikes a decent balance between a nice "Web 2.0" (gawd I hate
that term) interface and providing accessibility to all users.

Your second point of whether pages can be bookmarked/linked is not
something I considered. People w/o JS enabled can easily bookmark and
link to specific content pages. For people with JS the index.php is of
course linkable/bookmarkable. However, targeting specific content like
a traditional URI may be a problem. I'll do some research and see if
there is a solution.

Thanks for your comments,

MM

MM

On Jun 23, 2:07 pm, Mad Mouser wrote: