Will Googlebot follow _escaped_fragment_ HTTP redirect?

Question

I have an ajaxified website, and I want all my content to be crawlable. I have a photo gallery, which only loads the photo using ajax, without refreshing the whole page. My root URL is this:

http://mysite/photos

and whenever a photo thumbnail is clicked, it displays the photo, and hash becomes #!/photo/photoid/phototitle, or when you are searching for a criteria, it becomes #!/photos/f-number/1.8/iso/640 e.g. for searching for photos with f/1.8 at ISO 640 (and more criteria can be appended this way). When a user opens up a URL like http://mysite/photos/#!/photos/f-number/1.8/iso/640 the landing page, using a javascript, will redirect the user to http://mysite/photos/f-number/1.8/iso/640 (without the hashbang), and again, there, the page loads http://mysite/Dynamic/PhotoThumbnails.aspx?f-number=1.8&iso=640 using ajax (yes, javascript looks at the location path and parses it according to that format). For the first case (link of a photo itself rather than a search), using again, only javascript, the page loads the photo itself (along with some extra tables showing technical info about photo) from the url http://mysite/Dynamic/RenderPhoto.aspx?ID=123 (where 123 the ID of the photo).

Given this information, my problem is simple: I am planning to (on my masterpage load event) redirect all requests with _escaped_fragment_s to the appropriate RenderPhoto or PhotoThumbnails page, by parsing the _escaped_fragment_ at server side. Will that work? My main concerns are;

• Will Google follow the HTTP redirect? (301 or 302)
• Will I get into any trouble (such as being removed from index) as I am not showing the exact same content to Google? (a browser will load a side mavigation bar, and all those fancy css styles visually-nice-looking page etc. and then load the real content into a pane at that page, where Google will be getting the "true" content only. My base page, sidebar content thumbnail list page, and photo renderer are COMPLETELY different pages which implement their OWN logic, so I cannot ever merge them)
• If there is a risk of being removed due to the reasons above, what are my alternatives (no, I cannot merge the pages, it is NOT an option)? Do you recommend taking regular snapshots of pages and cache them and sending those to Googlebot?

Here is the current BETA of my website (yeah I know about lots of bugs), just to give you the idea how it will work: http://canpoyrazoglu.com/photos

I'm on ASP.NET 4.0, and using jQuery, if it helps.

Answer 1

A new answer to an old question. Yes it will follow it. However you may end up with both the clean and #! URLs. However, check this out (from Google Developer Guides):

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.

This is the Google Developer Guide link: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/faq#redirects

Answer 2

Yes, I'm pretty sure it will follow a redirect. The Facebook open graph debugger does, and this blog post advocates implementing redirects: http://www.yearofmoo.com/2012/11/angularjs-and-seo.html