I am working on a project that by default loads content via AJAX.
I want it to check if the user (or SE bot) has JS disabled, and if so display the content statically via PHP.
Is there a way to do this? I don’t think noscript tag would work here, as the page would be empty to the non JS users or bots.
Also doing a redirect to a different page it doesn’t make sense to me, as the links to the original page will not be taken into consideration by search engines and will not be able to index that page as they will be redirected.
What about unobtrusive JS? You could make the plain html page the default and then use JS to hide or replace the clunky bits with your fancy AJAX controls. You end up with only one page per view which dynamically upgrades itself. URLs are safe to pass around too.