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Our wordpress site utilizes the wordpress cms to serve up json data that we ingest via ajax requests and serve up with javascript. I would like to create URLs for my regular wordpress pages/posts that follow google's recommended crawlable ?_escaped_fragment_= URL permalink structure:

For more information on crawlable ajax, read this article.

This article also goes into detail about making your ajax-driven site google friendly

So, while the javascript driven content's link looks like this:

http:// examplesite.com/#!about

The regular post generated from wordpress should have a URL like this:

http:// samplesite.com/?_escaped_fragment_=about

I am wondering if there is any way to do this with all wordpress posts/pages through the wordpress system. One alternative, using a 302 redirect from the htaccess file back to the wordpress generated posts/pages, which I haven't confirmed is acceptable by google can be found here

Still, since we are using wordpress as a CMS, it seems like it would be easy to use Wordpress engine (or a plugin) to serve up these alternate URLs, especially since it is becoming the standard method of having your javascript driven site's content indexable. I tried to modify the permalinks with this URL structure, but that was a no-go and did not work.

Any and all suggestions welcome!

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  • Hash bang breaking the web one link at a time! Have you considered using PJAX github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax which is pushState and ajax together. Clean urls without the hash, without the bang.
    – Adam
    Commented May 15, 2012 at 15:16

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I would suggest not using the hash bang urls. Consider PJAX: https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax

It does partial page loads to speed things up and gracefully degrades for users with JavaScript disabled and search bots.

There is even a little library for making using PJAX in themes a bit easier (example).

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  • I guess the concern is, will this index the non-fancy pages, and force us to use a redirect for each wordpress built page, which forces search engines to throw up a red flag?
    – Starfs
    Commented May 15, 2012 at 15:58
  • what do you mean by "non-fancy" pages? PJAX works by causing partial page loads -- if someone visits without javascripts all the links just work like normal. So everything should get indexed. Commented May 15, 2012 at 16:07
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    @Starfs PJAX (as I also suggested above) writes clean URLs. It operates in the same fashiion as any AJAX request would, retrieving content without a page refresh, except there's no use of #! and you get clean URLs to /your-post all of /the-time so the SEs will see clean URLs and index those accordingly. Also ?_escaped_fragment_=about is not generated by WP, its requested by Google. Thus if you want to use the hash-bang then you need to map a rewrite rule that takes any request for ?_escaped_fragment_ to its normal equivalent i.e. the location of the remote-content. PJAX avoids that.
    – Adam
    Commented May 15, 2012 at 16:40
  • @Christopher and @ userabuser ok, Im trying to wrap my head around the PJAX method of doing this. My assignment was to do the escaped_fragment method because that is what google recommends, so I'd still like to know if wordpress can dynamically generate this type of permalink (ideally to avoid a 301 or a 302 -because there is so much conflicting information about all of this out there)
    – Starfs
    Commented May 15, 2012 at 17:49
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    also, if using PJAX, can we also use the hash-bang?
    – Starfs
    Commented May 15, 2012 at 17:55

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