Auto-loading content via AJAX - best practices
-
We have an ecommerce website and I'm looking at replacing the pagination on our category pages with functionality that auto-loads the products as the user scrolls. There are a number of big websites that do this - MyFonts and Kickstarter are two that spring to mind.
Obviously if we are loading the content in via AJAX then search engine spiders aren't going to be able to crawl our categories in the same way they can now. I'm wondering what the best way to get around this is.
Some ideas that spring to mind are:
-
detect the user agent and if the visitor is a spider, show them the old-style pagination instead of the AJAX version
-
make sure we submit an updated Google sitemap every day (I'm not sure if this a reasonable substitute for Google being able to properly crawl our site)
Are there any best practices surrounding this approach to pagination? Surely the bigger sites that do this must have had to deal with these issues?
Any advice would be much appreciated!
-
-
Hi Paul,
Pagination is always a bit of a sticky area!
Firstly I certainly wouldn't do any user agent detection, you don't wanna get busted for cloaking when you aren't even up to anything that naughty.
A nice way i've seen this handled (for wordpress sites although the idea can work on any site) is with the wordpress infinite scroll plugin : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/infinite-scroll/
That basically leaves the site as it is for non-javascript web browsers (so with page 1, 2 3 etc.) but if you have js enabled (i.e. not a spider bot) it will keep scrolling the page. This functionality could I guess be changed to create a pagination effect.
Tie this is with some rel="prev" and rel="next" markeup (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html) and I think that is certainly one way to fix the problem.
Another way could be using similar markup for a 'View All' page : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
Hope that helps!
Stuart
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
-
Best way to fix duplicate content issues
Another question for the Moz Community. One of my clients has 4.5k duplicate content issues. For example: http://www.example.co.uk/blog and http://www.example.co.uk/index.php?route=blog/blog/listblog&year=2017. Most of the issues are coming from product pages. My initial thoughts are to set up 301 redirects in the first instance and if the issue persists, add canonical tags. Is this the best way of tackling this issue?
Technical SEO | | Laura-EMC0 -
Unique Contextual Content
Let's say you have a page on your website which displays the current discounts available for iPhones. The page is a list of deals with buttons to reveal a promo code. Would adding contextual content to these pages improve rankings? If the main keywords are already on the page, such as "Save 20% on iPhone 5 with this great iPhone coupon code" where iPhone coupon code is the target keyword. Does it still make sense to put 500+ words of contextual content on that page, even when the content isn't really something the viewer cares about? I've noticed websites doing this, and ranking well. I wanted to know if this is a significant ranking factor or just a coincidence.
Technical SEO | | poke10 -
Duplicate content through product variants
Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico
Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG0 -
Best Practice - Disavow tool for non-canonical domain, 301 Redirect
The Situation: We submitted to the Disavow tool for a client who (we think) had an algorithmic penalty because of their backlink profile. However, their domain is non-canonical. We only had access to http://clientswebsite.com in Webmaster Tools, so we only submitted the disavow.txt for that domain. Also, we have been recommending (for months - pre disavow) they redirect from http://clientswebsite.com to http://www.clientswebsite.com, but aren't sure how to move forward because of the already submitted disavow for the non-www site. 1.) If we redirect to www. will the submitted disavow transfer or follow the redirect? 2.) If not, can we simply re-submit the disavow for the www. domain before or after we redirect? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thebenro0 -
Determine the best URL structure
Hi guys, I'm working my way through a URL restructure at the moment and I've several ideas about the best way to do it. However, it would be good to get some views on this. At the moment I'm working on a property website - http://bit.ly/N7eew7 As you can quickly see, the URL structure of the site needs a lot of work. Similar websites - http://bit.ly/WXH5WG http://bit.ly/Q3UiLC One of the sites has http://www.domain.ie/property-to-let/location/ And the other has http://www.domain.ie/rentals/location/property-to-let/ I could do with some guidance about the best steps to take with this. I've a few ideas myself but this is a massive project. Cheers, Mark
Technical SEO | | MarkScully0 -
Cloaking? Best Practices Crawling Content Behind Login Box
Hi- I'm helping out a client, who publishes sale information (fashion sales etc.) In order for the client to view the sale details (date, percentage off etc.) they need to register for the site. If I allow google bot to crawl the content, (identify the user agent) but serve up a registration light box to anyone who isn't google would this be considered cloaking? Does anyone know what the best practice for this is? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Nopadon
Technical SEO | | nopadon0 -
Best TLD for china
In China there are 2 commonly used tlds .cn and .com.cn. We own both versions for a new domain. Does anyone know if there is research done which one is the best TLD "in the eyes" of the search engines Baidu and Google? Or maybe there is a methodology to select the best? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Paul-G0 -
How damaging is duplicate content in a forum?
Hey all; I hunted around for this in previous questions in the Q&A and didn't see anything. I'm just coming back to SEO after a few years out of the field and am preparing recommendations for our web dev team. We use a custom-coded software for our forums, and it creates a giant swathe of duplicate content, as each post has its own link. For example: domain.com/forum/post_topic domain.com/forum/post_topic/post1 domain.com/forum/post_topic/post2 ...and so on. However, since every page of the forum defaults to showing 20 posts, that means that every single forum thread that's 20 posts long has 21 different pages with identical content. Now, our forum is all user-generated content and is not generally a source of much inbound traffic--with occasional exceptions--but I was curious if having a mess of duplicate content in our forums could damage our ability to rate well in a different directory of the site. I've heard that Panda is really cracking down on duplicate content, and last time I was current on SEO trends, rel="canonical" was the hot new thing that everyone was talking about, so I've got a lot of catching up to do. Any guidance from the community would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TheEnigmaticT0