Site Structure: How do I deal with a great user experience that's not the best for Google's spiders?

[tatermarketing]

We have ~3,000 photos that have all been tagged.  We have a wonderful AJAXy interface for users where they can toggle all of these tags to find the exact set of photos they're looking for very quickly.

We've also optimized a site structure for Google's benefit that gives each category a page.  Each category page links to applicable album pages.  Each album page links to individual photo pages.  All pages have a good chunk of unique text.

Now, for Google, the domain.com/photos index page should be a directory of sorts that links to each category page.  Alternatively, the user would probably prefer the AJAXy interface.

What is the best way to execute this?

[BlueprintMarketing]

the best thing to do right now is have a look at

Prior to building or finishing the site it would be a good idea to look at how Google is crawling the Ajax version of your planned directory or category I would use

the spider tool as well as the image tool

http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/spider/

http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/alt/

All tools

http://www.feedthebot.com/tools/

After your certain that the Ajax start causing any issues for Google bot I believe the best way to move forward is summed up in 2 links below very well.

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/case-study-determining-site-architecture-from-keyword-research/

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/why-you-should-map-out-your-sites-information-architecture/

I have not seen your website so I can't tell you if the user would prefer the Ajax However Google bot does not do well with Ajax vs text

"Problem 5: AJAX and URLs"

check out problem 5 in this link as well

https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/fixing-seo-problems-with-html5/

Sincerely,

[KristinaKledzik]

I'm not sure that I totally understand your question: are you building a site and wondering if you should make it beautiful with AJAX or readable for search engines with a clear category structure? Or do you already have a site with AJAX and now you've taken the time to come up with a category page structure, but you're hesitating to implement it?

If it's the first, I don't think that you should think that your choices are 1) be usable/beautiful, or 2) be search-engine friendly. There are a lot of ways to make an HTML site beautiful. You can use new enhancements in HTML5, or build a standard HTML site and then use JavaScript to make elements more interactive.

If it's the second, I'd go with Thomas's suggestion and test your AJAX site to see how readable it is for Google. AJAX isn't readable by Google, but the underlying HTML is, so there may be enough HTML links that Google can still get around your site.

Once you've tested how readable your site is, then you have to decide if this interface is worth pages being missed or ranked lower by Google. My guess is that you can probably keep your site the way it is primarily, but you'll have to make some tweaks. It's hard to give specifics without knowing specifics, though.

Good luck!