: As Google decided the protocol, you can't really tell it to use something different. If you ajaxy page doesn't have #! then google will try to crawl it as as normal page. You can add

As Google decided the protocol, you can't really tell it to use something different. If you ajaxy page doesn't have #! then google will try to crawl it as as normal page. You can add a special metatag (usually just for homepage) to instruct Google to crawl a page that doesn't have #! then Google will do the same replacement with escaped fragment and expects your server to return a result.

So if you add this metatag to index.php:

<meta name="fragment" content="!">

even though that index.php doesn't have a hash fragment, Google will still try to get a page from your server called index.php?_escaped_fragment_= and you can make your server serve the snapshot the same way it does with other pages.

Other than that, I don't really see why you can't technically always use hash fragments.

Depending on the project, I found it more useful and pragmatic to depend on techniques from Progressive Enhancement, i.e. make sure that my pages serve content without javascript so that Google - and other search engines - can crawl them then add my javascript afterwards. This technique worked perfectly on a highly ajaxified knockout-based project I worked on recently and we just ignored Google protocol and we went back to the basics (especially that we were interested in other search engines crawling our site as well).

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