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I am working on a project which makes use of autocomplete.js, the demo for it is here. The user chooses an option and the result will be shown on the same page, just like in the demo. The project essentially revolves around this idea and I am unsure as to how to implement it without hurting SEO.
The search is performed on example.com and the search result is displayed on that same domain. Should this be implemented in a different way to allow users to find the content?
Google doesn't want to index anything on your site that looks like search results. See Matt Cutts: Search results in search results. You should using some mechanism to keep Google from indexing the results of a search. As such, this JavaScript implementation is fine. Googlebot won't be able to crawl the search results, and that is what is desired.
If you have full pages worth of content, you should put that content each at its own URL and link to that URL. But Googlebot doesn't need or want to see one line search results like those available in the demo you linked.
If I am getting your question right, you want to index the search results too... But due to autocomplete.js and probably ajax requests, the result does not change the url.
If this is the case, to index content on google, you need to add certain parameters in your URL such as xyz.com/?q=search_string.
If you want to implement this, you will just need to update the window.location.
Then you need to update robot.txt accordingly. You might need to use wildcard and regex to allow google to trace the content.
Let me know if this information helps.
