Ajax Fragment Meta tag - Googlebot isn't reading the page's content

Question

I've read an article teaching how to make my ajax pages crawlable by the search engine bots, it works really fine when I'm using the fragment url #!, but now I'm trying to create a "homepage" with no fragment using the meta tag bellow:

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

And I'm using the code snippet bellow to find out what's going on with the googlebot.

<?php
if( isset( $_GET['_escaped_fragment_'] ) )
{
    echo "Crawler is gonna read that page!";
}
?>

The fact is that the robot isn't returning any value inside the _escaped_fragment_ statement.

Here is the link to the page: http://www.linkerama.com/novo/

And this one returns a value when I'm using the browser: http://www.linkerama.com/novo/?_escaped_fragment_=

Answer 1

How are you testing this? If you're using "Fetch as Google" read below.

Quote from http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/bZgWCJTnl08%5B1-25%5D by John Mueller (google employee)

Looking at your blog's homepage, one thing to keep in mind is that the Fetch as Googlebot feature does not parse the content that it fetches. So when you submit toddmoyer.net/blog/ , it fetches that URL. After fetching the URL, it doesn't parse it to check for the "fragment" meta tag, it just returns it to you. However, if you fetch toddmoyer.net/blog/#! , then it should rewrite the URL and fetch the URL toddmoyer.net/blog/?_escaped_fragment_= .

When we crawl and index your pages, we'll notice the meta-tag and act accordingly. It's just the Fetch as Googlebot feature that doesn't check for meta-tags, and instead just returns the raw content.

Hope that helps.