I have a website with a page with 10 tabs, each tab's contents is loaded by AJAX.
I would like Google to index the content of the tabs (loaded by AJAX), but Google should allow links ONLY to the parent page (not directly to the pages holding content of the tabs ). Otherwise someone will click a Google link which will take them to the unformatted tab content page.
How would I do this?
Use canonical urls.
So, if your "parent" page is http:\\www.example.com\page1.html, put this line in all your "children" page's <head> tag
<link href="http:\\www.example.com\page1.html" rel="canonical">
How it works? It simply says to spiders "give all the credit of this web page content to this one I link". So, Google crawls the content and then doesn't show it in organic search results pages, because all the credit is given to the canonical\"parent" page.
Here's a Google resource for canonicals: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
And here for iframes: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445?hl=en http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2064573/search-engines-frames
I suggest you to follow all the suggestions made in these links.
unformatted tab content pagesounds like you need to fix this part. You can use jQuery with hash locations or other triggers that take them back to the front page and then automaticlly load the Ajax Tab Content, or you make the linking page accessible when linking, in otherwords the page is mirrored on the link page and triggers the correct tab.