Does Google follow JS redirects?

[dathan.n@gmail.com]

Hi,

Does anyone know (or a least have a good guess) if Google follows JS redirects? (i.e. window.location.href = sTargetURL).

The reason I ask is because I have an idea that I’ll share with you because I think it’s a pretty great model for a website’s architecture and I’d appreciate any feedback on it: Search engines act as simple web browsers and don’t execute AJAX, right? This is a problem because an AJAX website is essentially just one webpage that is updated with new content retrieved from the server. However, I think that if a website we’re built in the traditional manner for the sake of search engine spiders and browsers without JS, then the sub-pages could use JS redirects to point the browser to the homepage which would use JS to transform it into an AJAX page, such as by capturing the click on a link to a sub-page then canceling it then executing AJAX.

This would seem to solve the problem of making an AJAX site search-engine friendly. J This would be very exciting news (to me at least). (YUI, BTW recently released a way to make back and forward navigation possible with AJAX - http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/history/)

What do you guys think? Thanks.