Infinite Scrolling on Publisher Sites - is VentureBeat's implementation really SEO-friendly?
-
I've just begun a new project auditing the site of a news publisher. In order to increase pageviews and thus increase advertising revenue, at some point in the past they implemented something so that as many as 5 different articles load per article page. All articles are loaded at the same time and from looking in Google's cache and the errors flagged up in Search Console, Google treats it as one big mass of content, not separate pages. Another thing to note is that when a user scrolls down, the URL does in fact change when you get to the next article.
My initial thought was to remove this functionality and just load one article per page. However I happened to notice that VentureBeat.com uses something similar.
They use infinite scrolling so that the other articles on the page (in a 'feed' style) only load when a user scrolls to the bottom of the first article. I checked Google's cached versions of the pages and it seems that Google also only reads the first article which seems like an ideal solution. This obviously has the benefit of additionally speeding up loading time of the page too.
My question is, is VentureBeat's implementation actually that SEO-friendly or not.
VentureBeat have 'sort of' followed Google's guidelines with regards to how to implement infinite scrolling https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html by using prev and next tags for pagination https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en. However isn't the point of pagination to list multiple pages in a series (i.e. page 2, page 3, page 4 etc.) rather than just other related articles?
Here's an example - http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/11/facebooks-cto-explains-social-networks-10-year-mission-global-connectivity-ai-vr/
Would be interesting to know if someone has dealt with this first-hand or just has an opinion.
Thanks in advance!
Daniel
-
Totally agreed, Daniel! I'd also say it's our job to set expectations and be clear about when something is a test vs when something will more than likely work. Consulting is all about setting expectations!
-
Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this John. Really appreciate you taking the time to look into it.
You make a great point about not always copying competitors without testing first. If it's rolled out on such a wide scale, it's always going to be a hard case to put to the client knowing that they're going to lose out in the short-term when it comes to advertising revenue but regardless, I think it's our job as SEOs to first and foremost propose the most SEO-friendly implementation possible.
-
This is actually a really interesting question. I looked at their category pages (eg http://venturebeat.com/tag/ar-vr-weekly/) and those seem to be set up correctly to handle infinite scroll as it sends the search engines to the next page.
I've not come across this with infinite scroll on articles, though. I'm sure they've tested it extensively to figure out the best way to send search engines to future articles, but who really knows if it's being effective. If it's still there, I'd assume that they've seen positive signs but it is definitely a non-standard implementation of rel-next/prev!
This does bring up a good point about copying/not copying a competitor's strategy. They have this implemented, but would it work for your own site/business? Maybe, but maybe not. We can't be sure until we test it ourselves (or speak with someone at VentureBeat who wants to share their learnings :-)). If you know when it was rolled out you could benchmark there and look at SEMrush or another tool to see their organic visibility and from there draw at least some correlation, if not causation.
Thanks for flagging this up! It's cool to see.
-
IT depends on application and other design aspects.
I have seen websites that implement the same thing and like morons keep a never accessible footer there as well... you have no idea how impossible it was to get to the social bar/links at the bottom.
You have to think of the user experience to be honest, while there may be good technical reasons for such a design, you must in the end consider what the user goes through and wants to get out of. A/B testing these kinds of things would not hurt either.
But honestly only "feeds" should be this way. Facebook feed, twitter feed, news feed and even then applications should be considered with care.
Disclosure: I personally hate this behavior by default... basically the only place I find it acceptable is on facebook and twitter.
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
-
Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
Hello, We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console. Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup? We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago. Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone? Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW2 -
Site build in the 80% of canonical URLs - What is the impact on visibility?
Hey Everyone, I represent international wall decorations store where customer can freely choose a pattern to be printed on a given material among a few milions of patterns. Due to extreme large number of potential URL combinations we struggle with too many URL adressess for a months now (search console notifications). So we finally decided to reduce amount of products with canonical tag. Basing on users behavior, our business needs and monthly search volume data we selected 8 most representative out of 40 product categories and made them canonical toward the rest. For example: If we chose 'Canvas prints' as our main product category, then every 'Framed canvas' product URL points rel=canonical tag toward its equivalent URL within 'Canvas prints' category. We applied the same logic to other categories (so "Vinyl wall mural - Wild horses running" URL points rel=canonical tag to "Wall mural - Wild horses running" URL, etc). In terms of Googlebot interpretation, there are really tiny differences between those Product URLs, so merging them with rel=canonical seems like a valid use. But we need to keep those canonicalised URLs for users needs, so we can`t remove them from a store as well as noindex does not seem like an good option. However we`re concerned about our SEO visibility - if we make those changes, our site will consist of ~80% canonical URLs (47,5/60 millions). Regarding your experience, do you have advices how should we handle that issue? Regards
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | _JediMindBender
JMB0 -
Can I post an article on my blog if it has already been published and taken down?
Hi Guys, A writer for my site has offered to let me post her article on my blog, however the article has already been published on another blog, but the blog has now been taken down. If I publish this on my blog will there be any harm to my blog? I want to stay clean and not be in trouble with penguin in any way shape or form! Cheers everyone appreciate some advice here!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Best URL structure for SEO for Malaysian/Singapore site on .com.au domain
Hi there I know ideally i need a .my or .sg domain, however i dont have time to do this in the interim so what would be the best way to host Malaysian content on a www.domainname.com.au website? www.domainname.com.au/en-MY
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
www.domainname.com.au/MY
domainname.com.au/malaysia
malaysia.domainname.com.au
my.domainname.com.au Im assuming this cant make the .com.au site look spammy but thought I'd ask just to be safe? Thanks in advance! 🙂0 -
Black Seo --> Attack
Hello there, Happy new year for everyone, and good luck this year. I have a real problem here, I saw in MOZ link history that somehow the "Total Linking Root Domains" is growing from a medium of 30 - 40 to 240 - 340 links and keep it growing. I guess somebody make me good joke, cause i did not buy any link :)) even cn, brasil, jp links, my store is from Romania. How I can block these links I think google will make me bad instead. What should i do? Thank you so much. With respect,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shanaki
Andrei 0tYg1wB.png0 -
Macrae's Blue Book Directory LIsting
Does anyone know more information about this directory? Is it a good quality directory that I should pay to get listed on?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
SEO dead?
What does everyone think about this article? http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2 … l-content/ I tend to think its off base, Link building still works and there are tons of things that have to do with SEO that have nothing to do with link building... I think its actually quite ridiculous and written by people that actually no nothing about SEO...kind of a lame attempt by Forbes, and if anything at all, this is just forbes practicing "SEO" with a link attraction post like this. Becase SEO, is NOT dead
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imageworks-2612901 -
Google turned me down, don't know why...
Hello, I'm experiencing decreasing on some of my keywords. I'm aware of some things which could be responsible for it. So I'd like to asi you, if my thoughts are right, and what to do with it. 1. I put backlinks leading onto my website. Those backlinks are on website I also own (they are on the same server). But nothing happened. Than I put other backlikns on this webiste. Those links also led to webistes I own. So could Google "punnished" those websites I'm linking to? 2. I offered my content to another website, which has a higher authority. This content had been published on my website weeks ago, I put it on this (another site). Co could Google punnished me for "duplicate" content? 3. In the past, we outsorced our SEO, and the company which was responsible for our SEO put backlinks leading to our website almost everywhere, I mean, those websites, they put links leading to our webistes fos focused on almost everything but our field (finance). But everything seemed to be fine, till now 4. Couple of days ago, I put our RSS on many RSS agregators and put our webiste on many catalogs. My website URL is www.penizenavic.cz Could you help me out? 🙂 Thanks a lot Petr
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petr.rozkosny0