Dynamic Ajax Content & SEO

[mobius2000]

1) Script Title:
Dynamic Ajax Content

2) Script URL (on DD):
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex17/ajaxcontent.htm

3) Describe problem:

I have managed to get the Dynamic Ajax Content script up and running however I was wondering what the SEO implications of this script are as it is used for loading main content into my page.

I would also like to ask if there is a way to tell search engines to not find the individual pages that get loaded into the Ajax window, just the outer shell that contains the "Container" div.

Any assistance on this would be greatly appreciated.

PS... Thank you for an awesome script, love it!

[ddadmin]

Well, the easiest way I can think of is just to add to the top of the external pages themselves a meta tag such as:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

This tells search engines to not crawl these external pages when they come across them as standalone pages. More info here.

[mobius2000]

Fantastic, that's great, thank you for that... I knew there was a meta tag like that however I didn't want to give it the wrong command and tell google to search everything etc.

If I tell the index page that contains the ajax window to allow google indexing, will that allow google to search for keywords through the external pages to assist in the ranking of the index page. My thinking is that the meta tag you provided will block the displaying of the external pages direct from google but hopefully there is a way that google can still determine that the content is there for the index page.

Ok, I'm confusing myself now... Let me know if that made no sense at all.

Thank you again ddadmin, that was a great help.

[ddadmin]

Well, with the above meta tag, the contents of the external pages themselves will not be indexed, though any links within said contents will still be followed and further crawled by Google. I don't think there's a way to tell Google to not index the contents of these pages unless they appear dynamically within the index page.