I need help implementing ?_escaped_fragment_= functionality on my web server to make my AJAX website crawlable by search engines. My current hash URLs are already using the #! format which is good.
The issue I’m facing is configuring my server to handle requests properly. When someone visits example.com/?_escaped_fragment_=page, I want the server to serve the same content as example.com/#!/page. Right now I don’t know how to set up this URL mapping.
Basically I need the server to recognize the escaped fragment parameter and redirect or serve the appropriate content. Has anyone implemented this before? What server configuration changes are needed?
The real challenge isn’t URL mapping - it’s getting your server to generate static HTML snapshots for crawlers. I built a separate rendering pipeline that processes _escaped_fragment_ requests through a headless browser. When that parameter hits your server, you’re basically simulating what a user sees after all AJAX calls finish. Started with PhantomJS but switched to Puppeteer since it’s not deprecated. You’re running your client-side app on the server to generate the final HTML state. Cache those rendered snapshots or you’ll destroy your server performance - generating them for every crawler request is brutal. Just remember Google’s moved away from this toward dynamic rendering, so think twice about whether this legacy approach makes sense for your project.
This takes me back - I dealt with the exact same thing a few years ago. You need to catch requests with the _escaped_fragment_ parameter at the server level and map them to your hash routes. I modified my server routing to detect _escaped_fragment_ in the query string, grabbed its value, and rewrote the request path internally. For Apache, I used mod_rewrite rules in htaccess to capture the parameter and serve content. With Node.js/Express, I wrote middleware that checked for the parameter and handled routing before other handlers ran. Here’s the crucial part: your server must render the full HTML content that normally loads via AJAX when hash fragments change. You need server-side rendering for those routes. Without proper content rendering, search engines still see empty pages even if your URL mapping works perfectly.
been there with the same headache. you need to catch those messy escaped fragment urls on the server and serve the real content instead of letting javascript deal with it. most people use url rewriting - nginx handles this pretty well, or u can build it into ur app. the trick is serving fully rendered html, not empty divs that get filled in later.