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Ajax Defined
You got your Ajax in my Ruby
“Codified by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in “Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications“, Ajax stands for “Asynchronous Javascript XML.” Essentially what Ajax does is move much of the smarts involving user-interaction from the web server to your web browser. This takes the form of an Ajax engine (a piece of Javascript code) embedded into a web page, downloaded to your browser, and springing into action upon arrival. Acting as an interaction broker, the engine takes care of all the whizbang interactivity you see (form input and validation, dragging-and-dropping, showing-and-hiding, etc.) while dealing with the web server (and it’s back-end database) as needed. “
Well, this clears up a few things. Now it the questions is how does this help me? I did find this toolkit, Sajax, that includes a PHP backend.
WordPress Dropped From Google, Yahoo for Hiding Articles
WordPress Under Fire for Search-Engine Spamming
“One of the most popular Weblog-publishing tools, WordPress, is stirring a controversy over search-engine gaming because it included thousands of articles related to popular search terms on its Web site while largely hiding them from site visitors.Bloggers and search-engine marketers are accusing the open-source WordPress project of spamming the major search engines, while at the same time being one of the advocates in an effort to combat comment spam in blog postings.“
In a nutshell, the lead developer of WordPress took money to link to articles that are invisible to regular visitors to wordpress.org, but are seen as links by crawlers. The result is that the weight given to the articles by search engines is increased by the volume of traffic to WordPress. Disclosure: this blog is powered by WordPress.