How exact does an _escaped_fragment_ URL's content have to match the viewable #! content for AJAX crawling?

[Clive Holloway]

I'm wrestling with a complicated AJAX based site, trying to make _escaped_fragment_ URLs look exactly like their #!/path equivalents in a custom framework.

I've managed to get it to pretty much work using PhantomJS, however the Phantom generated page does not display in the browser exactly the same as the shebang URL.

I've diffed the content, and can only see minor differences in the actual page content - a couple of missing classes, some missing font loading, an embedded google maps object not loaded etc, but no differences at all between the actual content in the page source.

What I'm most concerned about though is that an overlay in the page is not displaying in the Phantom generated content, even though I can see the content in the page source.

Is this something I should worry about? Or is it sufficient that the content accurately represents the displayed page?

[Jens]

As long as the content and links are available everything is fine (and don't forget the canonical link in the html head). You don't need to style your page for the crawler.

Compare the following google groups links:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-web-toolkit/ED3ZCjg4-OI

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/google-web-toolkit/ED3ZCjg4-OI

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-web-toolkit/ED3ZCjg4-OI/Qxcyxsyf2u8J

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=msg/google-web-toolkit/ED3ZCjg4-OI/Qxcyxsyf2u8J

-- J.

[Clive Holloway]

Thanks. That was what I thought, but I found the language Google used in the documentation to be a little ambiguous :D

Since the site isn't launched yet, I can't do a live test run, so I figured asking around was the best approach.

[Clive Holloway]

Oh, and it turns out the issue is in PhantomJS incorrectly making touch events visible in webkit when most webkit based browsers don't. A hack patch is available, but I'd rather not compile Phantom from source unless I have to.