Ajax website and SEO

[Profero]

Hi all,

A client of mine has a website similar to Pintrest. All in Ajax/.

• So imagine an ajax-grid based animal lover site called domain.com.
• The domain has three different Categories Cats, Dogs, Mice.
• When you click on a category, the site doesn't handle the URL and doesn't change the domain

So instead of the domain going from domain.com to domain.com/cats, it uses the Ajax script and just shows all the cat pins.

and when you click on each pin/post it opens a page such as domain.com/Pin/123/PostTitle

It doesn't reference the category. However a page domain.com/cats does exist and you can go there directly.

Is this an SEO issue for not grouping all pins under a category?

How does Google handle Ajax these days, it use to be real bad but if Pintrest is going so well i'm assuming times have changed?

Any other things to be wary of for a grid based/ajax site?

I am happy to pay for an hour or two for a more in depth audit/tips if you can feed back on the above.

Fairly urgent.

Thanks

[BrianJGomez]

Have you checked to see if the category pages are being indexed?

[Profero]

Hi BJ,

Over 7000 pages indexed. Yep all the categories are indexed, just getting a real lot of duplicate content from SEOMOZ.

More so interested in knowing if theres any best practise for an AJAX site seing that the way items get linked appears so diferent.

[donford]

Hi Rocco, I'm adding a response to I can easily find this post later.

My initial impression is that making a site with dynamic content and no new urls is a bad idea for SEO reasons, it does show creativity and if built correctly maybe a very user friendly environment. I know flash sites share some of the same problems but have made inroads into deal with them.

I have some programing thoughts on how I would deal with this issue, but nothing I have ever tried so I'm very interested in what others have to say on this matter.

[jeremycbray]

Hi BJ,

From an SEO point of view i don't like to work in AJAX but it sure has some user experience points, doesnt it.

Have you read this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/create-crawlable-link-friendly-ajax-websites-using-pushstate.

Common practise is to check the text cache of the site, that way you are able to see what the search engine see's and possibly see where your dulicate content issues are