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
-
Main Site and eCommerce Site URLs for SEO
My client currently has a main website on a url and an eCommerce site on a subdomain. The eCommerce site is currently not mobile friendly, has images that are too small and are problematic - and I believe it negates some of the SEO work we do for them. I had to turn off Google Shopping ads because the quality score was so low. That being said, they are rebuilding a shopping cart on a new platform that will be mobile friendly BUT the images are going to be tiny until they slowly replace images over several months. Would you keep the shopping cart on a subdomain, or make it part of the main website URL? Can it negatively impact the progress we have made on the main site SEO.
Technical SEO | | jerrico10 -
Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?
We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu. i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops) Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
SEO trending down after adding content to website
Hi
Technical SEO | | swat1827
Looking for some guidance. I added about 14 pages of unique content and did all of the on page SEO work using Yoast - have 'good' status on all of them some of the website architecture was changed - mainly on one page. That being said, we got a significant bump the day I implemented, however every day thereafter we have had very bad results. Worse than we had before for about 3 days now. I did resubmit the updated sitemap to GWT and I'm showing no crawl errors. Also, curious if my Robots.txt file could be the issue. All it contains is User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/ Any insight or advise is greatly appreciated!
Thanks for your time0 -
How do you build your pre-sales seo audit
Hello Moz community, I'd like to know if you build "pre-sales seo audit" when selling your services to a prospect. I think the main idea of a pre-sales audit is to show your prospect that you understand his industry (trends & competition) understand the opportunities know the roadblocks on his website If so, i'd be interested in discussing the information you put into your pre-sales audit and how you organise it. If you know ressources i should read as regards to mini seo audit / pre-sales seo audit just paste the link 🙂 Thanks for your answers
Technical SEO | | Sindicic_Alexis0 -
Do I need to do on-page SEO for my mobile site?
We have a desktop site, and we just built our first mobile site. Right now, the mobile site doesn't have any title tags, meta descriptions or anything like that, but do I need to even do that? If I have all of that on the desktop site, and the mobile site is just redirected from the desktop site, can't I just do it on the desktop site only? Is there anything to gain from doing it for both sites?
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Has anyone had to deal with malware found on their website?
I am helping my friend website and whole site has been hacked. Does anyone have had this problems? What's the best way to fix this problem? www.marksobhani.com/ Thank you
Technical SEO | | BistosAmerica0 -
SEO Audit - Panda
I am looking for a reputable SEO company to help diagnose Panda issues. I am very familiar with SEO and lead an in-house team so I need more than a basic audit. e.g You need unique content
Technical SEO | | WEB-IRS
e.g. You need to create quality content I am looking for someone with a technical mind to help diagnose. Please reach if you have someone in mind.0 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0