Hard refreshes and SEO

I couldn't find an answer to this on the web. I have a site, where I try to avoid hard refreshes as much as possible. It's a seque开发者_如何转开发nces of photos, and upon a user click of a central div, a little page (a RoR partial) loads within that div with a new photo in it.

The user keeps clicking, the photo keeps changing, and the URL of the page never changes. The title of the photo does change though. And so I want the web crawlers to see this...

Is there any advantage to having a hard refresh or not in this scenario? Will the Web Crawlers see the title of the photo in the div, and index my home page? Or at least the url of the inner div?

I hope this makes sense! Thanks!

It all depends on what you mean by a hard refresh. If all of the pictures, and their related data (title etc.) are loaded when the page first loads, and the click is just a javascript event that changes the css a bit to display the next picture then that has no negative effect on SEO. If clicking that link makes an ajax request back to your server to retrieve the image, then it will never get picked up by the search engine web crawler, and will not contribute to SEO.

If you aren't sure if this click is an ajax request, or just a css change, you can look at your html source to figure it out. If all your image tags are in your html source then it's not making an ajax request. If you only see one (or zero) then it is making an ajax request.

If the page title would never change, then there's no benefit. But if you're loading a new image, the page title should change for optimal SEO.

There's a workaround, though. Just make it to where you can access the images specifically with a static page and make sure Google spiders it. You can keep the normal page flow as-is using this method.

Edit: I should add that I had a site that got 60% of it's traffic from Google Image searches, so I'd say you'd definitely want them indexed separately.