Ajax #! URLs, Linking & Meta Refresh

[Improvements]

Hi,

We recently underwent a platform change and unfortunately our updated ecom site was coded using java script. The top navigation is uncrawlable, the pertinent product copy is undetectable and duplicated throughout the code, etc - it needs a lot of work to make it (even somewhat) seo-friendly. We're in the process of implementing ajax #! to our site and I've been tasked with creating a document of items that I will test to see if this solution will help our rankings, indexing, etc (on Google, I've read the issues w/ Bing).

I have 2 questions: 1. Do I need to notify our content team who works on our linking strategy about the new urls? Would we use the #! url (for seo) or would we continue to use the clean url (without the #!) for inbound links?

2. When our site transferred over, we used meta refresh on all of the pages instead of 301s for some reason. Instead of going to a clean url, our meta refresh says this:  . Would I update it to have the #! in the url? Should I try and clean up the meta refresh so it goes to an actual www. url and not this browsererrorview page? Or just push for the 301?

I have read a ton of articles, including GWT docs, but I can't seem to find any solid information on these specific questions so any help I can get would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Ecreativeworks]

If possible, I would have your linking teams keep using the clean URLs and canonicalize your URLs to the clean version (since this is easiest for users to see and understand). But if you can't use rel=canonical for whatever reason, certainly have the link teams link to the correct URL!

For number 2, push hard for the 301 redirects to the appropriate destination pages.