We would like to serve up SEO-friendly Ajax-driven content. We are following this documentation. Has anyone ever tried to write a 302 redirect into the .htaccess file, that takes the ?_escaped_fragment= string and send that to a static page?, for example /snapshot/yourfilename/.
How will Google react to this? I've gone through the documentation and it's not very clear. The below quote is from Google's documentation this is what I find. I'm not sure if they are saying that you can redirect the _escaped_fragment_ URL to a different static page, or if this is to redirect the hashtag URL to static content? Thoughts?
From Google's site:
Question: Can I use redirects to point the crawler at my static content?
Redirects are okay to use, as long as they eventually get you to a
page that's equivalent to what the user would see on the #! version of
the page. This may be more convenient for some webmasters than serving
up the content directly. If you choose this approach, please keep the
following in mind:
Compared to serving the content directly, using redirects will result in extra traffic because the crawler has to follow redirects to
get the content. This will result in a somewhat higher number of
fetches/second in crawl activity.
Note that if you use a permanent (301) redirect, the url shown in our search results will typically be the target of the redirect,
whereas if a temporary (302) redirect is used, we'll typically show
the #! url in search results.
Depending on how your site is set up, showing #! may produce a better user experience, because the user will be taken straight into
the AJAX experience from the Google search results page. Clicking on a
static page will take them to the static content, and they may
experience avoidable extra page load time if the site later wants to
switch them to the AJAX experience.