SEO for dynamically loaded content

Question

I feel completely lost concerning SEO and more precisely how to provide my to search engines with my dynamically loaded content. I guess I'm doing something wrong...

My website is a directory of sport races. The main page is a search page that display sport races based on multiple parameters (including the bounds of an interactive map).

I would like, of course, that google (and others) indexes every races referenced in my website. But it does not, even though I have proper sitemap.

The reason : when the page loads, the race list is empty, then the races are provided through an ajax call even without any parameter (to hide races in the past)

The quickfix i've found is to serve initially all the races (even the past races) and then replace the list with the ajax response.

Is that a good policy ?

I've seen the ajax crawling scheme from google but I'm not sure it would apply here.

Answer 1

The first thing you need to do is forget about filtering the data based on any given user-based input for the sitemap.xml file.

What you can do here is dynamically create the sitemap.xml file based on your database. The sitemap.xml file should list every page that your site has (based on the end user experience) which includes every page based of database results, and as long as the details of what race has been chosen, or other conditional arguments are fed into the URL for Google to work with Google would be able to take the links from the sitemap.xml file and add them to the search index for users to click on if they want to see your site.