SEO and the use of !# in a url

Question

I read somewhere about how you can create a website that loads each section of a page with AJAX while still providing SEO. It had something to do with the use of !# in a url. Similar to what twitter does. I can't seem to find anything about it anywhere. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Answer 1

Is this what you are looking for:

Quoting:

• Slightly modify the URL fragments for stateful AJAX pages Stateful AJAX pages display the same content whenever accessed directly. These are pages that could be referred to in search results. Instead of a URL like http://example.com/page?query#state we would like to propose adding a token to make it possible to recognize these URLs: http://example.com/page?query#[FRAGMENTTOKEN]state. Based on a review of current URLs on the web, we propose using "!" (an exclamation point) as the token for this. The proposed URL that could be shown in search results would then be: http://example.com/page?query#!state.

Answer 2

#! is called a "hashbang" and they are the root of all that is evil in web development.

Basically, weak web developers decided to use #anchor names as a kludgy hack to get "web 2.0" things to work on their page, then complained to google that their page rank suffered. Google made a work around to their kludge by enabling the hashbang.

Weak web developers took this work around as gospel. Don't use it. It is a crutch.

Web development that depends on hashbangs is web-development done wrong.

This article is far more well worded than I could ever be, and deals with the Gawker media fiasco from their migration to a (failed) hashbang centric website. It tells you WHAT is happening and why it's bad.

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs

Answer 3

Take a look at this article: http://eliperelman.com/blog/2011/10/06/handling-googles-ajax-crawling-hashbang-number-navigation-in-asp-dot-net-mvc-3/

It explains the implementation of hashbang navigation, allowing google to index your site.

Answer 4

Check Modify Address Bar URL in AJAX App to Match Current State, also this can be done from Flash and Ajax with http://www.asual.com/swfaddress .

Answer 5

I believe you are looking for this forum question here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=55f82c8e722ecbf2&hl=en