Does Google follow JavaScript redirects?

[dathan.n@gmail.com]

Hi,

Does anyone know (or at 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 it would be a pretty great model for a website’s architecture and I’d appreciate any feedback on it: Here's the problem, 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 event 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, is making a search-engine friendly website with pages that redirect to an AJAX website the best way to make websites?

Thanks.

[cheap freelancer]

Even meta refresh if taking more than few seconds, it is considered spammy, rather use .htaccess and redirect 301

[dathan.n@gmail.com]

Thanks, but the point of using a JS redirect is to determine if the browser uses JS. If it does then the user will be redirected to an AJAX page otherwise they will remain on the static page. This static page is also for the search engines since they don’t execute AJAX.