Issues with Duplicates and AJAX-Loader

[netzkern_AG]

Hi,

On one website, the "real" content is loaded via AJAX when the visitor clicks on a tile (I'll call a page with some such tiles a tile-page here). A parameter is added to the URL at the that point and the content of that tile is displayed. That content is available via an URL of its own ... which is  actually never called.

What I want to achieve is a canonicalised tile-page that gets all of the tiles' content and is indexed by google - if possible with also recognising that the single-URLs of a tile are only fallback-solutions and the "tile-page" should be displayed instead.

The current tile-page leads to duplicate meta-tags, titles etc and minimal differences between what google considers a page of its own (i.e. the same page with different tiles' contents).

Does anybody have an idea on what one can do here?

[netzkern_AG]

Hi CleverPhD,

Thanks for your answer! The website is indeed a little dated and did not consider SEO - or so I have been informed.

http://www.g1.de/projekte.aspx is the URL with the most clearest problems, although similar tiles also exist on other pages. As you can see by checking the code, the URL is changed, albeit in a non-ideal way (parameter) and the page basically stays the same with only a tiny fraction of its content changed.

The USAtoday approach is interesting and I will look into it. I have a slight feeling, though, that the approach is quite a bit different(?).

[CleverPhD]

I would really need to see the page you mention to make sure I am following you, but I think one approach would be that when the page is called via AJAX, call the actual URL, not the one with the parameter. That way you do not have the 2 URLs that need to be canonicalized to start with.  You would still need to test this with a spider program to make sure the URLs are found.  I am thinking you would also need a sitemap or alternative navigation to allow the spiders to find the pages and get the cataloged.

All of that said, I have to be honest, my gut is telling me that if you are having to work this hard to get the spider to find the URLs correctly, then you may also have an issue with this design being too clever for what it is worth.  You may need to rethink how you approach this.  USA today uses a setup that seems similar to yours check it out http://www.usatoday.com/  When you click on a tile to view a story, there is an AJAX type overlay of the home page with the article on top.  It allows you to X out and go back to the home page.  Likewise from the article you can page through other articles (left and right arrows).   While you do this, notice that USA today is updating with an SEO friendly URL.  I have not tested this site spider wise, but just by the look of it they seem to have the balance correct.

Good luck!