Welcome aboard emshabir. This is so easy you're going to laugh. :-)
"ajax_request()" queries some script or something, right? let's say it just requests random.php and random.php outputs your row. All you'll need to do is add
return false to the end of ajax_request();
function ajax_request() {
// your code
return false;
}
With that in place, you change your link like so:
<a href="random.php" onclick="
return ajax_request()">
By returning false on click, it stops the browser from executing the navigation. More important than "crawlable", if Javascript is disabled for your users, they can still access your content.
I'd add a little bit though. Now that the link will be followed, all it will display is your single line. For the link itself, I'd pass a variable* :
<a href="random.php
?full_page=1" onclick="return ajax_request()">
So in random.php, you would do
if (isset($_GET['full_page']) and ($_GET['full_page']==1)) {
// output a full (X)HTML page, with the
same body content }
else {
// output the one random line for ajax
}
The concepts are the same for perl, ASP, CF . . .
The "same content" is important, if you fill up the page with something different than what users see, it may be considered gray/black S.E. gaming, which will get the page dropped in the index (and takes forever to recover . . .)
* Advanced: in terms of search engines, I really wouldn't use a query string. The whole point is making your URL's and content relevant, so I'd want a relevant URL there. I'd probably do a rewrite, so my link would be something like
<a href="
/random-quote-of-the-day" onclick="return ajax_request()">
then in .htaccess/mod_rewrite (or Windows rewrites, whatever)
ReWriteRule ^random-quote-of-the-day/?$ /random.php?full_page=1 [NC,L]
