Static homepage content and javascript - is this technique obsolete?
-
Hi
Apologies beforehand for any minor forum transgressions - this is my first post.
I'm redesigning my blog and I have a question re static homepage content.
It used to be common practice in the online gambling sector (and possibly others) to have a block of 'SEO copy' at the footer of the homepage.
To 'trick Google' into thinking it was directly underneath the header, web devs would use javascript to instruct the html to load the div with the SEO copy first.
The logic was that this allowed for the prime real estate of the page to be used for conversion and sales, while still having a block of relevant copy to tell the spiders what the page was about, and to provide deep links into the site.
I attended a seminar just over a year ago at which some notable SEOs said that Google had probably worked this one out but it was impossible to tell. However, I've recently noticed that Everest Poker has what I think is the code commented out, and on PokerStars I can't find it at all (even in the includes).
I would be happy to post the Everest code but, while I've read the etiquette, I'm not 100% whether this is allowed.
So my question is... for the blog I'm redesigning, do I still need to follow this practice? I would prefer search engines saw some static intro text describing the site, rather than the blog posts, the excerpts of which will probably be canonicalized to the actual post pages to avoid duplication issues. But I would prefer this static content to appear below the fold.
What is current best practice here?
Alex
-
Thanks Edward
-
It would be possible to have the text at the beginning of the html document but then display it further down using CSS, not java script.
I don't think there is a massive need to do something like this. In the past Google may not have indexed all of the content from a page, especially if the document size was very large. This position trick would ensure that the important SEO focused content would be indexed.. if you build your site properly and take into account the size, page load speed, make sure the code is clean etc then there should be no need to move the content around.
-
Hi Vahe
Thanks for the response, and the article link - I'll take a look at that later.
However, I think you've misunderstood the situation. The content is not hidden - it's clearly visible and crawlable at the bottom of the page. However, it's placed in a div and that div is loaded immediately after the header, through the use of javascript.
I'm no javascript expert but Everest Poker appears to hvae commented the function out, and PokerStars appears to have removed it altogether.
If that is, in fact, what they've done (and I'm not misreading the code, which is possible), then my question is, does this 'trick' of placing text lower in the page, but telling spiders to crawl it first no longer work.
Hope that clears things up.
Alex
-
Hi Alex,
In my belief, unless served as alternative content, any hidden content is unethical SEO.
Have a go at content stacking - http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/move-up-your-web-page-content-for-better-search-en.html
Hope this helps,
Vahe
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
-
Interlinking from unique content page to limited content page
I have a page (page 1) with a lot of unique content which may rank for "Example for sale". On this page I Interlink to a page (page 2) with very limited unique content, but a page I believe is better for the user with anchor "See all Example for sale". In other words, the 1st page is more like a guide with items for sale mixed, whereas the 2nd page is purely a "for sale" page with almost no unique content, but very engaging for users. Questions: Is it risky that I interlink with "Example for sale" to a page with limited unique content, as I risk not being able to rank for either of these 2 pages Would it make sense to "no index, follow" page 2 as there is limited unique content, and is actually a page that exist across the web on other websites in different formats (it is real estate MLS listings), but I can still keep the "Example for sale" link leading to page 2 without risking losing ranking of page 1 for "Example for sale"keyword phrase I am basically trying to work out best solution to rank for "Keyword for sale" and dilemma is page 2 is best for users, but is not a very unique page and page 2 is very unique and OK for users but mixed up writing, pictures and more with properties for sale.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Duplicate content for hotel websites - the usual nightmare? is there any solution other than producing unique content?
Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites. I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money. Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Can a website be punished by panda if content scrapers have duplicated content?
I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening? I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
404 with a Javascript Redirect to the index page...
I have a client that is wanting me to issue a 404 on her links that are no longer valid to a custom 404, pause for 10 seconds, then rediirect to the root page (or whatever other redirect logic she wants)...to me it seems trying to game googlebot this way is a "bad idea" Can anyone confirm/deny or offer up a better suggestion?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JusinDuff0 -
Is this duplicate content?
My client has several articles and pages that have 2 different URLs For example: /bc-blazes-construction-trail is the same article as: /article.cfm?intDocID=22572 I was not sure if this was duplicate content or not ... Or if I should be putting "/article.cfm" into the robots.txt file or not.. if anyone could help me out, that would be awesome! Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
HTTPS Duplicate Content?
I just recieved a error notification because our website is both http and https. http://www.quicklearn.com & https://www.quicklearn.com. My tech tells me that this isn't actually a problem? Is that true? If not, how can I address the duplicate content issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0 -
Internal Pages outranking homepage in SERPs
First of all I would like to stress that this relates to a new site which is just a few weeks old, however it is something that has regularly happened to a lot of our websites in the past, so I am wondering if there is some underlying problem. We have recently setup the domain www.calcioitaliashop.com. The domain name itself "calcio italia shop" is actually one of the main keywords we are targeting. However, when we enter this into google (we are using .co.uk version), a lot of the category pages appear, yet the root domain does not. Does this indicate some coding problem with the website? I thought we might have some robots problem, but running a site://www.calcioitaliashop.com command shows that the homepage is in the index, so I am just wondering what could be causing these results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840