AJAX - a tradeoff

[undefined operator]

So, if you are using AJAX to, for instance, take a website that was a
collection of, say, seven separate pages and rework it so that it is
using innerHTML commands (and making requests to a serverside script for
much of the actual data that's going in the various <div>s) so that you
basically can combine all seven pages into a single page that's more
dynamic.

Isn't one of the tradeoffs that you're going to suffer somewhat in terms
of search engine results? What I mean is - before you had distinct
pages with their own keywords, titles, etc - things that the search
engine was using to "rank" you when someone does a search. And don't
most search engines now punish you for keyword stuffing? - so simply
stuffing all those keywords into a single page won't get you the same
result when potential clients/customers are doing searches - and,
besides, isn't it also true that search engines are also now preferring
the stuff inside <title></title> more because of keyword stuffing? - and
it's ridiculous to put everything you had in seven different
<title></title> areas into the new, single <title> area.

I guess what I'm getting at - if you have a business offering several
related services, and you formerly had them arranged on seven distinct
pages, and it was working quite well in terms of Google or other SEs so
that folks would search for one type of service and that page was near
the top then other folks would search for a different type of service
and that page was near the top - aren't you risking this if you redo it
in the AJAX style?

Is there a workaround? You hear about what you're giving up with AJAX
in terms of folks being able to bookmark appropriately and stuff like
that - and workarounds exist - but I haven't read much along these
lines, in the context of search engine optimization. Any thoughts?

 

[Garrett Smith]

So, basically, you leave the existing site, and add a small onload
function to the top of each page that checks for javascript support and
redirects the clients who have it turned on to the ajax-style page (and,
of course, set it to load the relevant info on that more dynamic page
depending on which of the preexisting pages they went to, presumably
after doing a search and clicking on the relevant page)?

No!

That is a contradiction to what Conrad wrote and hopefully he will
elaborate.

Garrett -> out.

 

[David Mark]

So, if you are using AJAX to, for instance, take a website that was a
collection of, say, seven separate pages and rework it so that it is
using innerHTML commands (and making requests to a serverside script for
much of the actual data that's going in the various <div>s) so that you
basically can combine all seven pages into a single page that's more
dynamic.

Don't.

[snip]

 

[JR]

[...] That way the site remains fully functional for all users
and search engines, but better equipped users don't have to download the
header/footer/navigation/css again with every click.

Not necessarily modern browsers will download header/footer/navigation/
css again if these items are already stored in the cache. it's still
possible to set far future expiry dates for some website assets which
will reduce the number of HTTP requests.

Cheers,
Joao Rodrigues