Infinite Scrolling Long Lists and SEO
-
Just curious if anyone else has tried this. I have pages with words that link to definitions. I have A LOT of them on a page and I am starting the process of trying to either do pagination (which I cant stand) or even cooler infinite scrolling where the page loads more words as the user scrolls.
Good Bad for SEO?
-
Infinite scroll may be useful for users, because they don't need to click click and click.
From an SEO point of view, yes it may be a problem if you don't set it up correctly.
Adam Sherk wrote a magnificent post about how to correctly set from an SEO point of view the use of infinite scrolling:
http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/seo-tips-for-infinite-scrolling
From a page performance point of view, I also suggest you to use - sorry I cannot remember the correct naming right now - that function that "retard" the upload of the content until it is now visible by the user due to the scroll down itself.
That way you are not uploading all the content of the page at the same time but just when it is really needed by the user.
-
Why not have the infinite scroll, but always have a link that goes to Page 2. That way the bot can crawl to Page 2 and then get a traditional layout and find the additional content and a user could click the Page 2 link and get into that mode as well.
May also want to consider that the infinite pagination is on sections that you keep the bots out of using robots.txt and then leave the pagination option open to the bots.
We do this for site search and if there are any sort options of a basic paginated version of the pages. Once the user does a search and/or tries to re sort a paginated layout, we push them to a /search/ url with parameters and then hide that with robots.
Another variation is to use a hash off the paginated page to let the variables be passed while keeping the base URL the same.
Rand has a really nice WB Friday on this - really neat trick - it is from 2009 but it is still relevant
http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash
Cheers
-
Sorry about that didn't mean to get off topic.
Hope everything goes well with the new website.
All best,
Tom
-
Nope that wasn't me
-
I think unfortunately pagination would be by far the best tactic.
Not only would Google bot failed to keep crawling and less the domain already had extremely high page rank but you would unfortunately have a real lot of trouble getting people to where they want to be if they're navigating your website.
If I may ask did you also have the question regarding Penguin and panda URLs?
all the best,
Tom
-
Yeah I was reading about it and its because since not all the content loads for the Googlebot it is going to miss stuff...ugh
-
Hi
i's a process similar that we used in app device, when somebody scroll we show the results.
I think that have all in the same page, if i understand correct is not good for a Seo
Ciao
maurizio
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO Rankings Ebbs and Flows on Ecommerce Site - Normal?
Hey everyone, I should start by saying I'm very new to SEO (I'm actually just a copywriter that's taken on this role at an agency), so I apologize if I'm using some common terms incorrectly or if there's a lack of information. I've been optimizing my first ecommerce website (clothing company), and things were going very well last year. Strong surges in organic traffic, peaking in the summer. There was a drop before the holidays when the client dumped a ton of new product pages that weren't optimized. After optimizing the pages, the traffic went back up to its summer levels. Now, there's about a 10% drop in organic traffic since earlier this year, and a loss of just over 20% of keywords the site was originally ranking for. There's no sharp drop in the Analytics, but a steady decline. To give a better idea, the site was ranking for 5,270 keywords in February; it's dropped to 3,772 keywords in April. According to SEMRush, almost all the dropped keywords are the lower volume ones, maybe indicating long tail keywords? I'm really not sure what the cause of the drop is, as I've been following (I think) best on-page practices, which seems to have yielded results last year. One thing I should mention is the client has a unique product page for each variant of one product (so the same shirt will have 10 of the same pages, the only difference being the colour). Could Google be penalizing the site for duplicate content? It was fine last year though with that same site structure; I'm not sure how long it would take for Google to penalize a site for that. Sorry for the wall of text. I'd really appreciate any insight into this. Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | EdenPrez3 -
Does homepage SEO exist at all?
hi Just read a Yoast article explaining that the homepage should never be optimized for a specific keyword and should only be optimized for its business or brand name. i have a large site that I'd like to rank (or increase traffic for as I know people get irritated with that term now) for 'Campervan hire'. It has plenty of sub pages going after 'Campervan hire 'location'' for example. it makes sense to me for the homepage keyword - my core keyword - to be 'Campervan hire' and for the homepage to be optimised for this. However, the article I've just read (https://yoast.com/homepage-seo/) suggests a separate page for this keyword. What are your thoughts pls?? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | CamperConnect142 -
SEO, 301s & backslashes at end of URL
Wordpess started adding "/" (slashes) at the end of my urls and I've left them up for some time. Will removing them hurt search rankings or do I need to do a 301 redirect? For example - www.site.com/page1/ changed to www.site.com/page1 Are there any other ramifications I may not be thinking about besides just search rankings.
On-Page Optimization | | MSpencer1 -
International SEO
We have a client who is looking to expand to other countries, particularly South America. What is my best route forward for SEO on a multi national site?
On-Page Optimization | | CreativeCow0 -
Infinite Scrolling in On-Page Search Results
We have a website being built that will effectively function like an e-commerce site. When customers search within the site, we will display the results (sometimes hundreds). We were thinking of implementing infinite scrolling, but with so many results which all function as links to product pages, would this look funny i.e. having too many onpage links? Would the links at the bottom pretty much just be ignored (which is fine) or would they bring disrepute to the results further toward the top of the page? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Trying to SEO a site that used Header Tags for Design
I am trying to SEO a website that was built years ago and uses Header tags for design. The site must have 25 and tags used for design purpose. Is there any way to work around this problem? Perhaps a code that tells Google to ignore these as Headers? The web designers say that they are looking to fix the problem sometime this summer but you never know if that means it a month away or years away. I really want to help this website but I believe that the Header tags are one of the reasons that his site does not show in the top 100 rankings for any keywords. Any help would be great. www.wallybuysell.com Chris.K
On-Page Optimization | | CKerr0 -
Do you think using accordion text can hurt SEO?
I have a lot of text for my home page. My plan is to a J Query Plugin for accordion text. Does anyone think that this can hurt SEO efforts?
On-Page Optimization | | DTOSI1 -
SEO Plugins for WordPress
Hi, Mozzers- I'm re-evaluating my SEO WordPress Plugins. What are your favorites and why? Are there others that you avoid and why? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | lhc672