These links are false links because they contain onclick=”return false”, when clicked an AJAX event is sent to the server to show the popup. However Google crawler doesn’t see this onclick handler and traverse the link, in the server this link is a “gate” to the state of “popup shown”, in some way the server simulates internally the steps to go this state using AJAX navigation (of course without user interaction).

Anyway this problem is interesting because it affects to “One Single Web Page” applications and web sites. These days the difference between web based applications and web sites is becoming irrelevant.

I think we can avoid the search engine problem of pure AJAX applications by using “permalinks”, visible or hidden. Permalinks are especial links to instruct Google (or any other web crawler) to traverse our AJAX intensive web application using page based navigation, every page is, as I like to name, a “fundamental state” of our intensive AJAX web application.

I’ve tried this approach with ItsNat, other frameworks using AJAX like Wicket and JSF (of course with AJAX) can use this approach. The problem is GWT because this framework isn’t template based and doesn’t generate an initial web page with markup.

For instance, this web application is searchable. More details here, and here a live example of this approach.