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I have been working on this website that heavily relies on jQuery template to render.

Using this HTML page as an example, there are calls like:

http://thetorontovibe.com/Events/Get?EventId=393219&callback=_jqjsp&_1303334398779=

that returns nothing but a JSON string to the browser.

While that's all working fine, it is not SEO friendly.

I have been researching on the topic and it seems that there really isn't a good solution around this but to redo some of the pages.

Currently I am planning to redo the pages with server-side code instead of using plain HTML such that I can have dynamic content in the <head> and <meta>. Tho easy, this seems like extra work.

Is there a better option?

Thank you,

Chi

Chi Chan
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  • You might have much more luck migrating this to webmasters.stackexchange.com - they give good SEO advice there. – Genadinik Apr 20 '11 at 21:36
  • In general, JS is SEO-unfriendly. But I am guessing you already know that. – Genadinik Apr 20 '11 at 21:36
  • This is why it's always good practice to have degradable sites -- when javascript isn't available, fall back on server generated page. – Gary Green Apr 20 '11 at 21:40
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    @GaryGreen you mean good practice to have javascript unobtrusive enhancement ;). Pages shouldn't degrade without javascript, they should enhance with javascript – Raynos Apr 20 '11 at 21:42
  • Thanks Gray. Ideally, yes, JavaScript should "enhance" a website. But I have been taking short cuts to get the project to where it is right now ;). I guess there's no other options but to do some rewriting huh? – Chi Chan Apr 21 '11 at 05:20

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I think what you are looking for can be found here: A spider's view of Web 2.0 It describes the format for making ajax request crawl-able, by processing the generated page after ajax calls.

Sergei Golos
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  • This might have an effect on how you structure your ajax calls. – Sergei Golos Apr 20 '11 at 22:06
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    Hi Sergei. Thanks for answering so quickly. Yes, I have already read that. The problem is that google requires you to have an "HTML snapshot" which basically is a portion of your ajax but with the SEO-friendly , , URL and all. My problem here is that everything is in JSON. It will be just as much work to build those snapshots than to rewrite the page. – Chi Chan Apr 21 '11 at 05:15