Get URI fragment (hash) to affect SEO? Get indexed by SEs?

Question

I am building a forum site where the post is retrieved on the same page as the listing via AJAX. When a new post is shown, the URI fragment is changed (ex: .php#1_This-is-the-first-post). Also the title and meta tags are changed.

My question is this. I have read that search engines aren't able to use #these-words. So therefore, my entire site won't be able to be indexed (as it will look like one page).

What can i do to get around this, or at least make my sub-pages be able to get indexed?

NOTE: I have built almost all of the site, so radically changes would be hard. SEO is my weakest geek-skill.

Answer 1

As difficult as it may be, the "best" answer may be to re-architect your site to use the hash tag URL scheme more sparingly

Short of that, I'd suggest the following:

1. Create an alternative, non-hash based URL scheme. This is a must.
2. Create a site-map that allows search engines to find your existing pages through the new URL scheme.
3. Slowly port your site over. You might consider adding these deeper links on the page, or encourage users to share those links instead of the hash-based ones, etc.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Add non-AJAX versions of every page, and link to them from your popups as "permalinks" (or whatever you want to call them). Not only aren't your pages available to search engines, they can't be bookmarked or emailed to friends. I recently worked with some designers on a site and talked them out of using an AJAX-only design. They ended up putting article "teasers" in popups and making users go to a page with a bookmarkable URL to read the complete texts.