I am making a simple CMS to use in my own blog and I have been using the following code to display articles.
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function(){
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200){
document.getElementById("maincontent").innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
}
}
What it does is it sends a request to the database and gets the content associated with the article that was clicked on and writes it to the main viewing area with ".innerHTML".
Thus I don't have actual links to other articles. I know that I can use PHP to output HTML so that it forms a link like :
<a href=getcontent.php?q=article+title>Article Title</a>
But being slightly OCD I wanted my output to be as neat as possible. Although search engine visibility is not a concern for my personal blog I intend to adapt this to a few other sites which have search engine optimization as a priority.
From what I understand, basically search engine robots follow links to index the web sites.
My question is: Does this practice have any negative implications for search engine visibility? Also; are there other reasons for preferring one approach over the other as I see that almost every site uses the 'link' method.
The link you've written will cause a page reload. In order to leverage the standard AJAX stuff you've got at the top, you need to write the links as something along the lines of
<a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="ajaxGet('article identifier')">Article Title</a>
This assumes you have a javascript function called ajaxGet that takes an argument of the identifier for the article you're searching for.
If you were to write your entire site that way, search engines wouldn't be able to crawl you at all since they don't execute javascript. Therefore they can't get to anything off the front page. Also, even if they could follow the links, they'd have no way of referencing the page they got to since it doesn't have a unique URL. This is also annoying for users, since they can't get a link to an exact story to bookmark, send to a friend etc.