[thelist] Relationship between one-page HTML / jQuery app and crawlable pages

[Jason Handby]

Hi all,

 

I'm building a 'one-page' HTML / jQuery application. I'm using
client-side jQuery to read data about farm animals from an XML file and
to set up corresponding thumbnails on the page. Clicking a thumbnail
will open a lightbox containing appropriate content - for example,
clicking the "ducks" thumbnail will open a lightbox containing
information and pictures about ducks.

 

Suppose I have a user who I know loves ducks - I can email them a URL
that will take them straight to the open ducks lightbox - something like
this: http://www.myapp.com/?ducks .

 

All good so far. But I also need to provide crawlable links for SEO
purposes.

 

I'm assuming I'll need to do something like this:

 

-        create http://www.myapp.com/ducks/default.html static HTML
page, full of interesting information / keywords about ducks (supplied
by the SEO people)

-        in that page, put a Javascript redirect to
http://www.myapp.com/?ducks to actually get my one page app to run and
then show the ducks lightbox when that page gets visited by a person

-        link to it from http://www.myapp.com/ so that it gets crawled.

 

for everything I want to be crawlable (ducks, geese, sheep...).

 

A few other thoughts:

 

I know I can use HTML5 pushState() to disguise
http://www.myapp.com/?ducks as http://www.myapp.com/ducks , but I don't
think I care about this as I don't mind people seeing  the '?' version
of the link once they arrive.

 

I'm trying to avoid using any server-side technology if possible, as
nothing else in this project requires it.

 

No, the actual project isn't really about farm animals :)

 

>From the SEO point of view, am I going about this the right way? Is
there an easier way to do this (as obviously I'd prefer not to create a
bunch of static pages, given that everything else is data-driven)? Any
comments or suggestions?

 

Many thanks in advance

 

Jason