Event Landing Pages not ranking

[zeepartner]

Hi there

I need to optimize the website of a club/concert venue. The site isn't bad and has authority, but the event pages don't seem to rank and I'm unsure about the reason.

There is an overview page of the events: http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/

What happens currently when clicking on a specific event (on "WEITER", top right of each event) is that users get redirected to a hashtag page by jQuery. The href of "WEITER" itself links to another landing page (which is IMO the one we should see ranking for the specific event).

Here is a concrete example:

• Look at the event "Tanz & Konzert: Andreas Vollenweider, Seven & ROKPA-KIDS" on /events
• by clicking on "WEITER", you get directed to http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/#2790/andreas-vollenweider
• the actual "WEITER" link in the source code though, points to the landing page http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/andreas-vollenweider/

This seems to be done by an AJAX load: jQuery loads a DIV with the ID "ajax-content". Apparently, this is the code responsible for it:

$(„.link“, click(function() {
 
     el.find('.wrapper').load(target+' #ajax-content', function() {
 
});
return false;
});

I know the site has good authority and should rank well. however, the event landing pages never seem to appear, but only the page /events is ranking: SERP
(Strangely, when using the site command, the event page suddenly appears above: SERP. (But I have never seen this in a "normal search query", even though we are the organisers and should at least be among the top 5).

Now my question: Does Google consider this AJAX load to be some sort of cloaking? (because the href in the code is different to you actually end up by clicking "WEITER").

Will the landing pages begin to rank if we disable this AJAX load? Or should we stick to hashtags and not even create landing pages? (but then, we will have no control over title tags of specific events, right?)

Thanks for your help, I'm a bit lost here as my JS knowledge is meagre...

Cheers,
Phil

[zeepartner]

Hi Cyrus

Thanks for your thoughts on this. You actually confirm my own suspicions... Indeed what we decided to do next is to get rid of the AJAX loads (since AJAX indexation would give our devs too much of a headache...). And we'll optimize the links to the event landing pages themselves by putting an href around the event's title as well.

I'll give a heads up when the changes have been done and as soon as I see any effect - be it positive or negative..

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Interesting question. Google seems to be crawling and caching the pages in question:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/klavierkabarett-sebastian-kraemer/

One of the possible problems I see is that the link element <a>is essentially an empty class which contains a background image comprising a button.</a>

<a></a>

<a></a>

I can't prove the following, but my gut tells me if you had to rank the "weight" of value that different types of links passed, it would look something like:

• HTML text links
• Image Links with Alt Text
• Image Links without Alt text
• CSS links that enclose neither image or text.

If it were me, I would turn those into actual text or image links, or at a bare minimum add a "title" element. (the last one is a superstitious long shot - the title element passes little or no value, but you never know)

As I interpret Google's language, this doesn't qualify as a "sneaky javascript redirect" but it's their opinion that counts, not mine.

It doesn't seem Google is indexing your AJAX pages, but there are some known workarounds to this.

If you really want the individual event pages to rank on thier own right, I would consider getting rid of the AJAX loads altogether. Right now, you seems to be walking a middle road with both types of content. By duplicating your pages through scripting like this, you risk sending mixed messages.

Hope this gives you some ideas!

[zeepartner]

anybody..?

i'll rephrase it again:

We have links on http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/ that point to event pages such as http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/cabaret-vitasek/. But on click, there is a jQuery (see above) that directs to http://www.kaufleuten.ch/events/#2643/cabaret-vitasek instead.

Is that considered a sneaky redirect?