Question

Is this possible? I have 4 pages that load dynamically with PHP/AJAX when corresponding menu items are clicked.

What is the best practice for optimizing content loaded dynamically with PHP? I have tried generating a basic xml sitemap but the only page that shows is the back end handler with relative paths to the pages, not the pages themselves.

Appreciate the responses, thanks.

Answer 1

Well, the best practice with Ajax links is that you still specify an address in the tags that non-js browsers can follow (search engines). A pleasant side effect of this (besides SEO) is that an XML site map would be just as simple to create as if there were no Ajax content loaded dynamically …

You should strive to make your Ajax content function normally in the absence of JavaScript. Then most of these kinds of issues will disappear.

UPDATE BASED ON COMMENTS

You have a couple of options based on the further explication in the below comments …

The simplest would be to implement consistent naming conventions among the cached versions of your dynamic content. Then you could simply scan the cache directory using glob^docs (or opendir^docs and readdir^docs) and generate the sitemap based on the names of files found in the directory.

Another option would be to create a “registry” of some kind that is updated whenever you cache a dynamic page. This could be a database table or a flat text file that maps the sitemap filename identifier to the actual cached file name. You would then add or remove entries from this registry whenever a cached file was stored or deleted.

As an alternative to a simple registry like I just mentioned you might use the XML sitemap itself as the registry. Each time a cached file was created, you could load sitemap.xml into a DOMDocument^docs and manipulate the sitemap in real time, saving it back to disk when you finish editing.

It really just comes down to problem solving, I think.