How authentic is a dynamic footer from bots' perspective?
-
I have a very meta level question. Well, I was working on dynamic footer for the website: http://www.askme.com/, you can check the same in the footer. Now, if you refresh this page and check the content, you'll be able to see a different combination of the links in every section. I'm calling it a dynamic footer here, as the values are absolutely dynamic in this case.
**Why are we doing this? **For every section in the footer, we have X number of links, but we can show only 25 links in each section. Here, the value of X can be greater than 25 as well (let's say X=50). So, I'm randomizing the list of entries I have for a section and then picking 25 elements from it i.e random 25 elements from the list of entries every time you're refreshing the page.
Benefits from SEO perspective? This will help me exposing all the URLs to bots (in multiple crawls) and will add page freshness element as well.
**What's the problem, if it is? **I'm wondering how bots will treat this as, at any time bot might see us showing different content to bots and something else to users. Will bot consider this as cloaking (a black hat technique)? Or, bots won't consider it as a black hat technique as I'm refreshing the data every single time, even if its bot who's hitting me consecutively twice to understand what I'm doing.
-
Thank you so much Sir Alan. I really appreciate your efforts for compiling this detailed response to my questions. Have noted down all the points along with how better I can handle them, will soon come up with a better fat footer.
-
Nitin
You're dealing with multiple considerations and multiple issues in this setup.
First, it's a matter of link distribution. When you link to x pages from page 1, this informs search engines "we think these are important destination pages". If you change those links every day, or on every refresh, and if crawlers also encounter those changes, it's going to strain that communication.
This is something that happens naturally on news sites - news changes on a regular basis. So it's not completely invalid and alien to search algorithms to see or deal with. And thus it's not likely their systems would consider this black hat.
The scale and frequency of the changes is more of a concern because of that constantly changing link value distribution issue.
Either X cities are really "top" cities, or they are not.
Next, that link value distribution is further weakened by the volume of links. 25 links per section, three sections - that's 75 links. Added to the links at the top of the page, the "scrolling" links in the main content area of the home page, and the actual "footer" links (black background) so it dilutes link equity even further. (Think "going too thin" with too many links).
On category pages it's "only" 50 links in two sub-footer sections. Yet the total number of links even on a category page is a concern.
And on category pages, all those links dilute the primary focus of any main category page. If a category page is "Cell Phone Accessories in Bangalore", then all of those links in the "Top Cities" section dilute the location. All the links in the "Trending Searches" section dilute the non-geo focus.
What we end up with here then is an attempt to "link to all the things". This is never a best practice strategy.
Best practice strategies require a refined experience across the board. Consistency of signals, combined with not over-straining link equity distribution, and combined with refined, non-diluted topical focus are the best path to the most success long-term.
So in the example of where I said initially that news sites change the actual links shown when new news comes along, the best news sites do that while not constantly changing the primary categories featured, and where the overwhelming majority of links on a single category page are not diluted with lots of links to other categories. Consistency is critical.
SO - where any one or a handful of these issues might themselves not be a critical flaw scale big problem, the cumulative negative impact just harms the site's ability to communicate a quality consistent message.
The combined problem here then needs to be recognized as exponentially more problematic because of the scale of what you are doing across the entire site.
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
-
Bad keywords sending traffic my site, but can't find the source. Advice?
Hi! My site seems to be the target of negative SEO (or some ancient black hat work that's just now coming out of the woodwork). We're getting traffic from keywords like "myanmar girls" and "myanmar celebrities" that just started in late June and only directs to our homepage. I can't seem to find the source of the traffic, though (Analytics just shows it as "Google," "Bing," and "Yahoo" even though I can't find our site showing up for these terms in search results). Is there any way to ferret out the source besides combing through every single link that is directing to us in Webmaster Tools? I'm not even sure that GWT has picked up on it since this is fairly new, and I'd really love to nip this in the bud. Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 199580 -
Dynamic Content Boxes: how to use them without get Duplicate Content Penalty?
Hi everybody, I am starting a project with a travelling website which has some standard category pages like Last Minute, Offers, Destinations, Vacations, Fly + Hotel. Every category has inside a lot of destinations with relative landing pages which will be like: Last Minute New York, Last Minute Paris, Offers New York, Offers Paris, etc. My question is: I am trying to simplify my job thinking about writing some dynamic content boxes for Last Minute, Offers and the other categories, changing only the destination city (Rome, Paris, New York, etc) repeated X types in X different combinations inside the content box. In this way I would simplify a lot my content writing for the principal generic landing pages of each category but I'm worried about getting penalized for Duplicate Content. Do you think my solution could work? If not, what is your suggestion? Is there a rule for categorize a content as duplicate (for example number of same words in a row, ...)? Thanks in advance for your help! A.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OptimizedGroup0 -
Will implementing 301's on an existing domain impact massively on rankings?
Hi Guys,I have a new SEO client who only has the non-www domain setup for GWT and I am wondering if implementing a 301 for www will have a massive negative impact on rankings. I know a percentage of link juice and PageRank will be affected. So my question is: If I implement the 301 should I brace myself for a fall in rankings. Should I use a 301 instead to maintain link juice and PageRank? Is it good practice to forward to www? Or could I leave the non www in place and have the www redirect to it to maintain the data? Dave
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | icanseeu0 -
Footer links VS Page links - Which one is best?
Hello all 🙂 I was wondering if someone could advise me on a link building question. If you wish to create a couple of landing pages for different locations with anchor text link building etc is it better to have a page like this web site here: http://www.acorncommercial.co.uk/commercial-property/development-sites/ or quick footer links like this web site here?: http://www.robertholmes.co.uk/ (click on quick links at the bottom). I would like to know if there is a difference from an SEO perspective or if they are considered black hat. Your advise would be much appreciated! Yiannis
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | artdivision0 -
I'm worried my client is asking me to post duplicate content, am I just being paranoid?
Hi SEOMozzers, I'm building a website for a client that provides photo galleries for travel destinations. As of right now, the website is basically a collection of photo galleries. My client believes Google might like us a bit more if we had more "text" content. So my client has been sending me content that is provided free by tourism organizations (tourism organizations will often provide free "one-pagers" about their destination for media). My concern is that if this content is free, it seems likely that other people have already posted it somewhere on the web. I'm worried Google could penalize us for posting content that is already existent. I know that conventionally, there are ways around this-- you can tell crawlers that this content shouldn't be crawled-- but in my case, we are specifically trying to produce crawl-able content. Do you think I should advise my client to hire some bloggers to produce the content or am I just being paranoid? Thanks everyone. This is my first post to the Moz community 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steve_benjamins0 -
Can't figure out how my competitor has so many links
I suspect something possibly black-hat is going on with the amount of inbound links for www.pacificlifestylehomes.com ( http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.pacificlifestylehomes.com ) mainly because they have such a large volume of links (for my industry) with their exact targeted keyword. Can anyone help clear this up for me?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | theChris0 -
Beaten in SERP's by a site going 'all in' on 2 keywords in their anchor text profile.
I would like to get peoples thoughts on putting 80% of your anchor text links in just 2 keywords vs a nice spread of branded and longtail keywords.. like I am. recently fell off the first page for a key SERP.. and the site in P10 has gone nuts on just that two keyword's.. I know we have a good site onpage/ conversion / low bounce rate page views etc.. Pretty sure we get more traffic than them. Seems that this obvious bloated anchor text profiling has worked for them though.. What do you guys think/know?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters0