My website is setup like: when the page loads, a jQuery animation — in the template — is played which, on completion, further makes an Ajax call to fetch the content of the page. Now, I want to deploy hashbang like http://com-address/#!page and I need to retain the animation at the page load as well. But I assume the problem with this setup is; when the web-crawler visits the page, it doesn’t wait for the animation to complete and make the Ajax call. It requires the state of the page with the loaded content (which, in my case is acquired after the animation is completed).
Given the above scenario, which way is better:
-
Change the entire flow and load the page content preemptively and hide it
till the animation is played. -
Only when the hash-bang or _escaped_fragment is found in the URL:
a. follow step 1.
b. load the page with the content without animation.
-
My assumption about the web-crawler is incorrect & let the
current flow as it is.
Any heads-up advice?
EDIT
@kdzwinel, thanks for the tip about text-browsers!
On the second thought, I’ll go with the option 2(a) because when the crawler visits the resource with fragmented URL, it should get the full resultant content on the page. And if the user navigates directly to the fragmented URL, the user-experience with animation would be intact too (by removing the content on the dynamic content fragment between the page load and the animation starts).
Also for all the other scenarios, we would continue the old flow (animate then fetch via Ajax) because we don’t want to refresh the page since the user is already visiting the website and trying to navigate smoothly/seamlessly using anchors with fragmented URL (binding their click events to begin animation).
Web crawlers don’t execute javascript (webmaster guidelines –
), if you wan’t your content indexed go with option #1. Load the content when page is opened and if browser supports javascript – hide the content and show the animation.