Does anyone have any tips for SEO in WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM?
-
Hi I'm working on performing SEO on a portal that's implemented on WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM.
Now WebSphere Portal comes with some limitations such as non-pretty urls among other things. Portal also generates non-normalized urls, so you have to turn on a process for detecting and normalizing urls for the Googlebot, etc.
Does anyone have any experience with SEO in this platform, and could offers me a few tips for this specific platform?
Thank you
-
Thanks for your input. It's just as I though apparently we should re-think our strategy into using the WCM servlet directly instead of through Portal. When WCM is used through Portal via the WCM portlet the content item is fetched through that WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter, but the parameter itself seems less relevant to Google.
I'll look into this. Thank you for all your help.
-
The NCAA site does seem to be pretty well put together. Like you said, their TITLE changes from page to page, which you need for decent SEO. Also, once you figure that out, you should also be changing your META description tag within the HEAD on each page on your site, so it describes that page you're on. In the meantime, I would recommend removing your meta description altogether from all of your pages if you can't set it on a page by page basis. That way, the search engines will try to pick out the most relevant text from your pages (and relating to the user's search query) instead of always using "Auto Insurance from Universal Insurance Group Trusted. Fast. Service." (also you're missing some punctuation here between Group and Trusted).
Working within this platform, one thing which the NCAA site is doing well,which I think you could try to do is to get that nasty session parameter out of your URLs. I think you only need that if you're tracking the user's session? The NCAA site doesn't include it until I click the member login link. Since the Googlebot won't be signing in, if you can manage to get rid the these parameters when people aren't signed in, that would improve the SEO of your URLs.
The more of these random directories you can get out of the URLs, the better. So it looks like the way it's configured right now, is the URL doesn't change, except for the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter at the end, which is setting the content of the page? The NCAA site is getting the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter to appear at the end of the URL, like it should be, rather than as a parameter. That is much more natural, and I would imagine Google rather see keywords in the URLs rather than in parameters in URLs.
-
Hi and thank you for your help. The site in question is the following: http://www.universalpr.com/
In this platform the URL holds session information such as the language, navigational state, among other things. Now this platform has a normalization process that detects the user-agent and looks for bots such as the Googlebot. Once portal detects a crawler bot it strips out most of the session information out of the URL. The end result is still not pretty, but it aims for consistency otherwise you could get a huge number of URLs that reference the same content.
When using WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM (the CMS) content is displayed as modules or sections of the page that are called portlets; such portlets don't have direct access to the HEAD. This makes using canonical URLs is a bit challenge. However we're working on finding a way to write to the HEAD for updating the TITLE and adding canonical elements to the pages.
The following are two other examples that use this platform:
- http://www.ncaa.org/ - This site uses WCM stand alone and it redirects to WebSphere Portal only whenever necessary (i.e. the login). The benefits of this approach is that they can use canonical elements and that the can update their titles depending on which content is being displayed.
- http://miamidade.gov/ - Miami Dade is a lot similar to my example; which is www.universalpr.com. In Miami Dade's case the use the Lotus WCM portlet. If you click around this site you'll see that their Title is always the same and that they don't use canonical elements in their page either.
It goes without saying that I could benefit from using the NCAA's approach, however this would require quite a bit of re-work.
These are some of the shortcomings that I can identify with my limited experience in SEO. If you need any more details at all please let me know.
Thank you,
-
Let me preface this by saying I don't have any experience with WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM. If you could describe more about what the platform outputs, or know of a site using it, I could take a look.
Non-pretty URLs aren't great, but they're not the worst either. If you're stuck with 'em, you're stuck with 'em. According to the SEOMOZ 2011 rankings report, having keywords in the URLs are still pretty important (69.9/100).
One way to work around the non-canonicalization of the URLs is including rel=canonical tags to all of your pages. That way, when Google comes across a non-normalized URL, you'll have the canonical tag to tell it the right page to pass the Pagerank to. Provided you always know what the normalized URL is supposed to be for non-normalized pages, this makes it easy to always have the Pagerank going to the right page. Even if the normalized version rel=canonicals to itself, Matt Cutts gives that the aok (video here). If you have a procedure that's working to normalize URLs, that's best, since we never know what's going to happen next.
More sources about rel=canonical: Google Webmaster Tools help and Webmaster Central Blog.
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
-
Craft CMS SEO Resources
I'm just starting out in freelance SEO & I've taken on a client who is using Craft CMS (version 2.0ish) for their site. I am not even close to being competent enough to manually code via Twig, but I had the main developer install the SEOmatic plugin for me. My question from here is - are there any resources or tips I should be aware of starting out? I just started by updating meta title/descriptions via "New Template Meta(s)" but I'm a bit concerned i'm doing the "template path" thing right - I haven't seen any visible changes in browser, and the SERP preview I'm getting is giving me a broken link. But i'm doing a fresh Moz crawl right now to see if the changes took place or not. so 1. Am I on the right track? 2. How long does it typically take for changes to start to show? 3. Is there anything I should be aware of? any follow up questions just let me know, I'll be following this thread!
Technical SEO | | dig_ad_austin0 -
Does anyone know if an increase in 804 HTTPS errors will affect SEO rankings?
We recently moved our whole site over from HTTP to HTTPS and we went from having 106 keywords in the top 3 positions to 80 in just one week. The only thing that I can think of that caused the drop is the HTTPS changes to our site. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | SimonWorsfold0 -
Homepage 301 and SEO Help
Hi All, Does redirecting alternate versions of my homepage with a 301 only improve reporting, or are there SEO benefits as well. We recently changed over our servers and this wasn't set-up as before and I've noticed a drop in our organic search traffic. i.e. there was no 301 sending mywebsite.com traffic to www.mywebsite.com Thanks in advance for any comments or help.
Technical SEO | | b4cab0 -
URL Path to Store Article Library for SEO
What is the best URL structure for a domain to start adding a main directory for educational articles under? We want to find the best URL structure to keep articles under as a main, then category, then subcategory: For example, if my client is going after TWO SPECIFIC KEYWORD PHRASES as their primary (let's say they are KIDNEY DIALYSIS and CKD DIALYSIS, should they start building up their article library (for educational purposes as well as ranking/SEO), should they list it under which structure for the best SEO ranking opportunities: domain.com/KIDNEY-DIALYSIS/article1, article2, article3 domain.com/CKD-DIALYSIS/article1, article2, article3 domain.com/ARTICLES/article1, article2, article3 Both KIDNEY DIALYSIS and CKD DIALYSIS are critical phrases for them. Is it a waste of URL space to just have a home of domain.com/ARTICLES then build off that URL structure like: domain.com/articles/kidney-dialysis domain.com/articles/ckd-dialysis Thoughts? Ideas? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0 -
Would an automatic redirect to itunes affect SEO?
We recently started working on a website and most of the work done so far is resolving onsite technical issues (duplicate content, duplicate titles, broken links, pagespeed, grammar, etc.). Everything done has been positive, but their position in SERPs has actually gone down. I'm having a look to see if anything I have done could have had a negative effect. However, when visiting their website on a mobile device, it automatically redirects you to iTunes so that you can download their app. My first instinct is that this is a horrendous idea as it would result in a massive bounce rate which would be impossible to track. I have tried convincing them to do it differently, but this is how they want it. However, when googlebot visits the website as a mobile it returns an error. I'm fairly sure that this would have a negative effect on search results but I could do with a second opinion.
Technical SEO | | maxweb0 -
Pageflip SEO friendly?
Client of mine utilizes pageflip for their product brochures and would love to have this content be crawl-able by search engines. Is there a way to make them SEO friendly so I may utilize this content?
Technical SEO | | richn330 -
Free Joomla SEO Extension?
Hi all -- all along, I have used Tag Meta as a super simple Joomla extension to manage page titles. The most recent Joomla site I manage is using K2. The Tag Meta extension will install, but something with K2 is overriding the page titles that I put in. Thus, I am simply looking for a free (if at all possible) Joomla extension that will allow me to enter unique page titles for each page of the site without changing the Joomla page title of each page. Or, if anyone has had the same problem, I'm looking for a solution to make Tag Meta and K2 play nice. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0 -
Country domain: Seo for other languages
Hi, I have an italian domain (.it) for an italian hotel, it is an old authoritative domain (1997) and it is well optimized for the keywords that include the city the hotel is in, now the page is decently positioned in Google Italy. There are many problems to have the same rank for German version (in google.de, google.at). The German version is in the /de folder. The hotel has another .com domain, much less authoritative (2007), in a German server, but it was and is only a simple redirect 301 (by code) to the German version in the .it domain. (obviously the rank for this domain is almost nonexistent). Do you have any suggestion? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | depi0