when to use AJAX and when not to use AJAX in web application

We have web applications elgifto.com, roadbrake.com in which we used AJAX at many places, especially to update major portions of a page. All the important functionality of elgifto.com was implemented using AJAX. Now we realize a few issues due to AJAX im开发者_如何学JAVAplementation.

1. All the content implemented using AJAX is not available to the SEO bots and it is hurting the page rank of our site.
2. Users will not be able to bookmark some of the pages as they are always available through AJAX.
3. When we want to direct the user from one page through an anchor link to another page having AJAX, we find it difficult.

So now we are thinking of removing AJAX for these pages and use it only for small functionality such as something similar to marking a question as favorite in SO. So before going ahead and removing, we want to know expert's opinion on this. Thanks.

The problem is not "AJAX" per se, but your implementation of it. Just as a for instance, you can fix the 'bookmark' problem like google maps does it: provide a generated link for each state of your webapp.

SEO can befixed by supplying various of these state-links to the crawlers, either organically trough links in your site, or by supplying a list (sitemap).

If you implement 2, you can fix 1 and 3 with those links.

In the end you must figure out if the effort is worth it, and if you are not overusing AJAX ofcourse, but the statements you've made are not set in stone at all.

I'm costantly developing ajax based websites, with no problems for SEO at all. You just have to use it in the best possible way.

For example, I have a website with normal links pointing to normal webpages (PHP pages), this for normal navigation if a user doesn't have JS enabled. But if a user has JS enabled, a script will change the links behavior, only fetching the content of the page needed.

This way you still have phisycal separated webpages with all their content, which will be indexed as normal.