Live example, Google now crawls Ajax

I thought of redoing the navigation menu on the site, full of links to different sections and making it less “spam” for search engines and more convenient for visitors. The idea was simple.

• from the main page all links to sections of the site in HTML
• links in the menu from sections only to thematic sections
• make other links to non-topic sections in JavaScript in a separate file

I will omit the details of the implementation of this idea, but it turned out very well, I like everything.
And suddenly I noticed a sharp drop in traffic from Google. What? How? Why?


It seems that on the contrary I wanted to do the best, direct the search engines in the right way, but it turns out not so smoothly.

Recently, Google began to crawl and index AJAX sites!
It seems nothing new and no one heard, but they just once again surpassed everyone.
Everything is very simple.

1. The site supports the AJAX crawl scheme.
2. The server provides an HTML snapshot for each AJAX URL that is visible to the user (through a browser). AJAX URL contains a hash fragment, for example example.com/index.html#mystate, where #mystate is a hash fragment. An HTML snapshot is all the content displayed on the page after the JavaScript code is executed.
3. Search engines index the HTML snapshot and serve the original AJAX URLs in their search results.

That is, it turns out that Google saw every page of the site with a bunch of links to all sections, made its conclusions and reindexed the site in its own way.

A living example , a source on a subject .