Dynamic Ajax Content -> good or bad?

regarding Search Engines: will they read the subpages?

[Mobull]

I have been playing with this script on Dynamic Drive a little :
dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxcontent.htm

I now have a complete website without frames or iframes, but I was wondering how search engines will react to this. Will they still see the content of the subpages or will it now only see the initial page with a lot of Javascript on it?

Second question: IF search engines don't have problems with this type of content loading. What will be the advantage when using Ajax instead of (i)frames?

[edited by: Mobull at 8:33 am (utc) on May 24, 2007]

[Dabrowski]

Search engines certainly won't look at your JS, so if you just have the one page with a lot of AJAX calls, then they'll only see the 1 page.

But.....

Search engines also don't read frames, to my knowledge. The only thing they are interested in as far as I know, are <a href> and <img src>.

Funnily enough I was thinking about this the other day, I have used frames in the past to give the website a more consistent feel - the entire page does not reload, just the content area. I thought of writing the page as static HTML, no frames, just separate pages. Now your JS could alter every link to point it to an AJAX function. That way the search engines, and JS disabled people would see a normal site, but most users would get the enhanced, better feeling site.

[Mobull]

So javascript or frames, it will make no differences for Searchengines?

well, what I maybe can do in order to have s.e.'s maybe indexing the site, is adding a NOSCRIPT part in which I place the links as normal hyperlinks...
Same as you would do with a frameset page (NOFRAMES tags).

[Dabrowski]

When I have used frames my 'wrapper' page had the main site header with link bar anyway, so it didn't matter because the search engines would read the links. It's not good though because your index page then contains no content.

Are you using frames or iframes?

[Mobull]

frames...it's pretty old now.

but since I re-build everything with that AJAX code I can make it with iframes as well by changing a div and rename it to Iframe.

[edited by: Mobull at 12:09 pm (utc) on May 24, 2007]

[Dabrowski]

I haven't used full framesets for donkeys! Although they're still allowed in the HTML4.01/STRICT DTD, so no reason not to. I've used an iframe with the page content, so yes, your AJAX solution is just 1 step up.

If you want to keep using your frameset a <noframes> with a link list should satify the spiders.

The last site I did I ditched my IFRAME in favour of SHTML SSI.

[Joseph Rissler]

Search engines don't read frames. When they search for a page, they strip all HTML. They may, however, view other pages you have, if you have submitted a site map to them.