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
-
International SEO And Duplicate Content Within The Same Language
Hello, Currently, we have a .com English website serving an international clientele. As is the case we do not currently target any countries in Google Search Console. However, the UK is an important market for us and we are seeing very low traffic (almost entirely US). We would like to increase visibility in the UK, but currently for English speakers only. My question is this - would geo-targeting a subfolder have a positive impact on visibility/rankings or would it create a duplicate content issue if both pieces of content are in English? My plan was: 1. Create a geo-targeted subfolder (website.com/uk/) that copies our website (we currently cannot create new unique content) 2. Go into GSC and geo-target the folder to the UK 3. Add the following to the /uk/ page to try to negate duplicate issues. Additionally, I can add a rel=canonical tag if suggested, I just worry as an already international site this will create competition between pages However, as we are currently only targeting a location and not the language at this very specific point, would adding a ccTLD be advised instead? The threat of duplicate content worries me less here as this is a topic Matt Cutts has addressed and said is not an issue. I prefer the subfolder method as to ccTLD's, because it allows for more scalability, as in the future I would like to target other countries and languages. Ultimately right now, the goal is to increase UK traffic. Outside of UK backlinks, would any of the above URL geo-targeting help drive traffic? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Do Letters With Accents Affect SEO?
Hi Guys, My company has a franchise of a foreign company that uses an accent/foreign letter in its brand name. We have to refer to this franchise with this symbol on our website to meet their standards. I've done some research on this but its not conclusive, so i was wondering whether anyone here can confirm this for me; Will using the letter with this symbol impair our rankings for this franchise name? Obviously as a UK business people search for this franchise with a regular letter and not the accented one. I would have thought that Google is clever enough to recognise the meaning of the accented letter by now and therefore it wouldn't affect rankings (much). Furthermore, do you think that it would make any difference to use the HTML element to represent the accent rather than copy and pasting the symbol onto our website? I would've thought this would help Google pick it up, but it might not make a difference anyway! Any help is appreciated. Thanks Sam
Technical SEO | | Sandicliffe1 -
IP redirect possible SEO issues?
Hi I help manage a small eCommerce business that sells worldwide. We currently have 4 stores www.tidy-books.com (US site) www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) www.tidy-books.eu (EU) www.tidy-bboks.com.au (AU) We have auto redirect based on the country of your IP. The .com is the route address though. Currently I have decided to focus all my energies with link building etc on .com as it seems to carry the most weight and being a very small team we don't have the resources for separate campaigns for all websites at the moment. Whilst I've done on site SEO with country in mind i.e for US kids instead of children. I'm just wondering if you can see any pitfalls in this approach, Ideally I would like to have a team focus on each store separately and have them as separate domains but with the IP redirect we at least rank well in Google for the .com and the customers gets sent to the relevant store. Any thoughts would be great
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Types of SEO Help
I have a web site that is going well but I think it could be better as far as usability and design. Also, I am sure an SEO professional would have some things to do to optimize. It seems though, that all the SEO companies either want to have along term contract or they don't work with my technology. Does anyone know of a company that would take my Visual Studio/C# project and tweak it for usability, design and SEO features for an hourly or set price?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Https enabled site with seo issues
Hello, Is there a problem with seo bots etc to crawl and rank my wesbite well if the entire site is https enabled? We have a sign in button which results on the next page being https along with the main homepage and all other pages are https enabled. Any major setbacks to the seo strategies? How do I overcome these issues?
Technical SEO | | shanky10 -
Which Wordpress Framework for Best SEO
Which wordpress framework would you use for SEO. From what I have had a look at: Thesis is good but you cannot use other SEO plugins with it such as yoast SEO as it is not compatible Genesis or woo framework are good and a plugin like yoast SEO works well with them. What are your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | VivaArturo1 -
Global SEO Targeting
Hi, I have a website currently on the domain example.co.uk (.com is not available) I'm looking to enter other markets such as Brazil, Russia - obviously content will need to change to suit the desired market / language. I'm looking for some information on the best practice to enter foreign markets. I was thinking maybe to create individual sites for each location eg: example.br example.ru This way I could localise each site in terms of business directories, content, language etc. Or have my example.co.uk with various languages on it Experience, suggestions are welcomed - thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0