Question

I need to implement a “search by criteria” (I don’t know if there is a more accurate word in english) for my website.

I have products that have attributes such as color, price, type, etc… and I need to allow the user to browse them selecting those criteria.

But for each produced result, I need :

• a unique URL
• the selection to be directly accessible to web crawlers

I need a strong SEO.

So for now, to follow these rules, it seems that my best option is to propose a link for each criteria.

This is a basic example :

<a href="http://www.mywebsite.com/search.php?color=red">color : red</a>

This solution is pretty good in my opinion but :

• page must be reloaded

• I can’t mix criteria : color + price for instance. It’s color OR
  price. It’s red OR blue.

So my question is : is there a best way to do it ? Keep the SEO aspect but offer a more user-friendly experience ?

I would like to use checkboxes with Ajax requests (I already have the component ready) but web crawlers won’t play with it, won’t they ?

Thanks in advance for helping me with this 🙂

Answer 1

<a href="http://www.mywebsite.com/search.php?color=red" onClick=”navigate('search.php#color=red'); return false”>color : red</a>

This is an idea for a solution, so you can have both a navigable link (for bots) and an ajax link (for users)

I like best when urls become http://www.mywebsite.com/red/ and you keep on composing urls by adding “criterias” (or parameters)