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hi i am working on a project. it is going to be a rather large site and we are looking into controling the page content through ajax. so baically there will be one page and the content will be created through an ajax call to a seperate file. for each link clicked.
My question is how would this affect search engines, what are the down sides and upsides.
The "conventional wisdom" is that doing extensive AJAX, Flash, or other dynamically loaded content will hurt you in search engine results. My observation is that this is true if you don't engage in a strong, and risky, backlink building and viral marketing campaign. It can also hurt your quality score if you plan on doing keyword advertising like Google Adwords, thus making your per click cost rise dramatically.
A better strategy is to build a HTML only mirror site. This has the advantages of increasing your search engine visibility, your advertising quality score, and making your site accessible to all users.
hmm ok not sure i follow, my understanding of how the SEbots parse is to follow links to the page and parse the html returned, so using ajax to pull content and put it in a div on a single page from this point of view should not hurt my seo should it.
Granted I may misunderstand something about how they work, but is it ok or not to say that as long as there is a link and it is w3c valid and can be followed by the bot that it should have no problem getting to the content.
Most of what I know about it comes from Flash sites more than AJAX ones.
There has been some discussion around since about 2004 about how well GoogleBot reads and evaluates Javascript links. Some contend that the bot can deal with anything while others say it only does simple executions and searches for known exploits. Since AJAX is relatively new I'd lean toward them not fully evaluating it, depending on the complexity of the page. I've also heard the Adwords "quality score" bot (or the algorithms that use bot data) is less tolerant of Javascript than the indexing one but I'm not sure about this.