Ajax without ruining crawlability?
 

Is it possible? How would I do it? Teech me teecher! I think Ajax is a nice buzzword, but I am a SEO nut before an Ajax fan. Most of the people in the search engine fields stay away from mentioning Ajax, and all the articles I have read user power words as well as unrelated "facts" and don't look reliable at all.

So, I am asking the Ajax developers of TalkPHP:

Is it possible to not ruin your chances with search engines with Ajax? Does it require building an entire "dummy site" for the engines to go through?

AJAX just allows you to get and send information to a server without having to refresh the page. I doubt it'd affect your SEO results at all.

Google can't crawl that information that is fetched by AJAX...

A dummy site is exactly what you need to make. Let PHP output a fully working web page that doesn't need javascript or ajax. And then you'd use some sort of "init" script that changes links in to some sort of ajax callback function..

AJAX does NOT ruin SEO if used correctly. A good example of Ajax being used in the correct manner is the quick reply feature on this forum. A bad example of Ajax is a plain HTML page that uses Ajax to grab all its content.

See, this forum uses PHP to manage content and just prints out plain old, good, HTML. It also uses Ajax, but not for printing content to the screen, only for adding content to the MySQL database. The Ajax doesn't get in the way of the page's content.

I hope that wasn't too confusing.

Again another reason why most flashsites have an html page as well. :-) Think of a sheet of paper. Everything that is on TOP can be crawled. That is underneath the sheet, which YOU can't see, can't be crawled.

The way I learned it. :-)