Question

The google guide Making AJAX Applications Crawlable tells how to format your url with hash an ! in order to make your site crawlable. A good example for that is the new twitter. If you type the URL:

http://twitter.com/dinizz

You will be redirected to:

http://twitter.com/#!/dinizz

I realized that the redirection is made on the server side, because i have tried to do with javascript and turns to every time that i’d change the url the browser reloads the page, i am trying to do on the server side with Ruby on Rails without success.

any help?

UPDATE: I found another question that address the same problem: How to show Ajax requests in URL?

Answer 1

This can’t be sensibly done server side.

What should happen is that a client without JS will request the page, and then get data they can use.

If you redirect server side, then they will request the page, get a redirect to the homepage with a fragment identifier, and then get the default content of the homepage.

You have to do the redirect in JS on the client side.