[uf-rest] Indexable AHAH pages - <link>?

Sat Dec 24 10:44:10 PST 2005

Well, while waiting for someone with better information to answer my  
question, I did a little research on Google.  No hard answers, but a  
few interesting data points.

1.  One option is to manually submit the relevant pages via a SiteMap:
SiteMaps: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm? 
node=133&largePage=TRUE

However, that implies making those links visible to humans, which  
would be confusing.

2.  Google apparently searches *some* <link> entries, despite sorta  
saying it doesn't:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html#whatlinks
> 12. What kinds of links does Googlebot follow?
>
> Googlebot follows HREF links and SRC links.
>
> 16. How do I add my feed to the search results for Google's  
> personalized homepage and Google Reader?
>
> The feeds that Googlebot crawls appear in the search results for  
> Google's personalized homepage and Google Reader. To ensure that  
> your feed is part of this index, add a <link> tag to the header of  
> your webpage to enable feed autodiscovery.
Still, it could mean that Google (and other services) only follow  
"feed" links. Any search engine gurus in the audience?

3. It does raise the question -- if one *does* link AHAH pages from  
the parent page, what is the proper "rel" attribute?

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/types.html#type-links

> Chapter
> Refers to a document serving as a chapter in a collection of  
> documents.
> Section
> Refers to a document serving as a section in a collection of  
> documents.
> Subsection
> Refers to a document serving as a subsection in a collection of  
> documents.
"subsection" seems a natural designation for an AHAH page -- since it  
is morally equivalent to a portion of the current page -- but is that  
the really right semantics?  Is it worth defining a new profile for  
this usage?  Or should this not be in the <link> section at all?

-- Ernie P.

On Dec 23, 2005, at 9:04 PM, Ernest Prabhakar wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> A friend of mine raised an interesting question.  He wants to use  
> AHAH for important website content, so he'd like to make sure that  
> it gets properly indexed.  My suggestion (which I added to the  
> wiki) was:
>
> http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/ahah#Indexing
>
>> Another advantage of AHAH is that the dynamic XHTML content can be  
>> easily indexed by search engines; this avoids the need to inline  
>> all the dynamic content as hidden divs, which would increase page  
>> load times.
>>
>> The current best practice for doing this is to:
>>
>> included <link> tags in <head> of the parent page, to reference  
>> the various URLs retrieved by AHAH
>> include <redirects> in the outer HTML of the AHAH page, so that  
>> search hits go to an appropriate anchor on the parent page
>> It is possible that some crawlers will automatically index the  
>> URLs in the JavaScript calls, if recognized as such (e.g., due to  
>> the "html" extension, or if it is an absolute URL), though it is  
>> not clear how well this would work.
>
>
> However, I'm not enough of a web crawler guru to know whether this  
> is actually good advice. Anybody more knowledgeable want to chime in?
>
> Thanks!
>
> -- Ernie P.
>
>
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