how to change url at address bar without reloading the page

Question

I have http://mysite.com/index.php.

And a sub menu

• home => http://mysite.com/index.php
• about us => http://mysite.com/about.us.php
• pro

Answer 1

This sounds like it should be accomplished with a rewrite engine, but assuming that you have a good reason to use AJAX, you can change urls with javascript by modifying the portion after the hash, or better yet, the hashbang:

window.location.hash = "#!about-us";

• http://mysite.com/
• http://mysite.com/#!about-us
• http://mysite.com/#!products

For more info on the hashbang from an SEO perspective, check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-allow-google-to-crawl-ajax-content