Ajax magic: How is Kotaku achieving Ajax *and* Google accessability?

Kotaku has launched a new design without hashbangs. Their site still clearly uses ajax requests, but somehow it is still found through Google and the content shows up in the pagesource. How do they do it? Their text seems to be contained inside a script type=text/javascript, but I don't understand what effect that has, or why they would do that. (of course, the first page request may just trigger a static, serverside constructed response. But check other articles, it does load json through an ajax request. No page refresh)

Have a look at this site for example:

http://kotaku.com/5800326/read-some-of-new-tomb-raider-game-right-now

No hashes, a very well formed URL and it appears in Google. I have read the Google Ajax guide, and as far as I understand it, Google only requests an html snapshot iff you use #! inside your url.

For your convenience, I have made a scree开发者_开发问答nshot that shows how the text looks inside the Chrome debugger: (what does "ganjaAjaxContent" mean?)

If you search for this article, it is the first match in Google: Google search for Kotaku article

Being able to do ajax without having to worry about Google search would be excellent.

Kotaku and the other Gawker sites are doing a number of things for SEO:

• Submitting XML sitemaps for all of their content
  • http://kotaku.com/sitemap_today.xml
  • http://kotaku.com/sitemap.xml

• Correct use of title and description tags for Google and Facebook

  • <title>Read Some of New Tomb Raider Game Right Now</title>
<meta name="fragment" content="!">
<meta name="title" content="Read Some of New Tomb Raider Game Right Now" />
<meta name="description" content="Upcoming Tomb Raider reboot doesn&#039;t have a release date yet, but website Siliconera apparently has the game&#039;s script and published what&#039;s reportedly an excerpt from it. Check it out. [Siliconera]" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Read Some of New Tomb Raider Game Right Now" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Upcoming Tomb Raider reboot doesn't have a release date yet, but website Siliconera apparently has the game's script and published what's reportedly an excerpt from it." />

• Displaying HTML post content when Javascript is turned off (inspect the <div class="post-body quick-post"></div> element)

So you're right, Google's first visit loads the semantic, accessible serverside-constructed page. WHile Google can crawl hashbang pages, it doesn't need to, because all of the pages are indexed via the sitemap.xml

Hope this answers all of your questions.

p.s. having said all this, hashbangs are still bad for the web

• http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/02/09/Hash-Blecch
• http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs
• http://blog.benward.me/post/3231388630