Is this tabbed implementation of SEO copy correct (i.e. good for getting indexed and in an ok spot in the html as viewed by search bots?
-
We are trying to switch to a tabbed version of our team/product pages at SeatGeek.com, but where all tabs (only 2 right now) are viewed as one document by the search engines.
I am pretty sure we have this working for the most part, but would love some quick feedback from you all as I have never worked with this approach before and these pages are some of our most important.
Resources:
http://www.ericpender.com/blog/tabs-and-seo
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=03fdefb488a16343&hl=en
http://searchengineland.com/is-hiding-content-with-display-none-legitimate-seo-13643
Sample in use: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
**Old Version: **
http://screencast.com/t/BWn0OgZsXt
http://seatgeek.com/boston-celtics-tickets/
New Version with tabs:
http://screencast.com/t/VW6QzDaGt
http://screencast.com/t/RPvYv8sT2
http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/
Notes:
- Content not displayed stacked on browser when Javascript turned off, but it is in the source code.
- Content shows up in Google cache of new page in the text version.
- In our implementation the JS is currently forcing the event to end before the default behavior of adding #about in this case to the url string - this can be changed, should it be?
- Related to this, the developer made it so that typing http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/#about directly into the browser does not go to the tab with copy, which I imagine could be considered spammy from a human review perspective (this wasn't intentional).
- This portion of the code is below the truncated view of the fetch as Googlebot, so we didn't have that resource.
- Are there any issues with hidden text / is this too far down in the html?
Any/all feedback appreciated. I know our copy is old, we are in the process of updating it for this season.
-
Cool. When we launched them separately we overvalued the potential for ticket prices rankings and had so little respect from engines that double ranking was hard. Also, I wasn't as on my game with SEO back then.
I think merging is the way to go, I am filing it into our dev. queue for the coming weeks.
-
I'd probably agree with that merge decision. Topic is basically the same, primary difference is inclusion of "price" in the keyword targeting from what I see, and that can likely be achieved with one master page.
Furthermore, having awesome data integrated like that will lead to links, because it's better than most crappy ticket sites. Big boost in PA from that leads to better rankings than just the 2 pages IMO.
-
Thanks for the helpful response. And I definitely am with you on the idea of having better data on all our pages. I initially set it up separately but have been leaning towards merging those ticket price pages with the tickets pages and killing off (301ing the price pages to the tickets pages). Make sense?
-
My general rule of thumb is that as long as all of the content is delivered via HTML (which it appears to be), and the switching of the tabs is done via javascript (which it is) than you're mostly OK.
You do have one issue though - the current code on http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-tickets/ doesn't die gracefully. You recognized this in your notes, but if a user doesn't have Javascript turned on, they can't access the text. That's an issue for usability, and you could make an argument that it might be bad for SEO, but either way I believe it should be fixed. When javascript isn't enabled, the content should still load below the event listings. Typically that means it should load that way automatically, and javascript should then hide the tab when the page loads and show it once they click on the tab.
Ideally the content would be made easily available (currently the tabs aren't as intuitive as they are on a Facebook page, for example). Putting them above the photo might help that?
Also, from a user perspective, the written content is mostly there for SEO purposes right now. Stuff like the price stats is cool information that I would find interesting while shopping for tickets - maybe there's a way to show that graphically on the page in a more interesting way than text?
Update - I just noticed that those stats are displayed on http://seatgeek.com/miami-heat-ticket-prices in an awesome way - do stuff like that for all of your pages!
On the same tabs topic, but separate from your implementation, I've seen companies load content from an XML file using Javascript. That is definitely not SEO friendly and can cause indexation issues.
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
-
Purpose of static index.html pages?
Hi All, I am fairly new to the technical side of SEO and was hoping y'all could help me better understand the purpose of dynamic rendering with index.html pages and any implications they might hold for SEO. I work to support an eComm site that includes a subdomain for its product pages: products.examplesite.com. I recently learned from one of our developers that there are actually two sets of product pages - a set of pages that he terms "reactive," that are present on our site, that only display content when a user clicks through to them and are not retrievable by search engines. And then a second set of static pages that were created just for search engines and end in .index.html. So, for example: https://products.examplesite.com/product-1/ AND https://products.examplesite.com/product-1/index.html I am confused as to what specifically the index.html pages are doing to support indexation, as they do not show up in Google Site searches, but the regular pages do. Is there something obvious I am missing here?
Technical SEO | | Lauren_Brick0 -
Is my website indexed correctly in Google - www.couponshop.co.uk
Our website www.couponshop.co.uk has just had a relaunch after a change of direction.
Technical SEO | | LaurenGT
A lot of the pages were redirected. When I checked the indexing of the website on Google, I put site:couponshop.co.uk and only two pages come up, but when I put site:www.couponshop.co.uk they all show up.
Is this correct or are we doing something wrong?0 -
What's the correct SEO for a Gallery?
Hi there, I was wondering if anyone was an expert on galleries and using canonical URL's? URL: http://www.tecsew.com/gallery In short I'm doing SEO for a site and it has a large gallery (3000+ images) where each specific image has it's own page and each category (there's 200+) also has its own page. Now, what I'm thinking is that this should be reduced and asking Google to index/rank each page is wrong (I also think this because the quality of the pages are relatively low i.e little text & content etc) Therefore, what should be suggested/done to the gallery? Should just the main gallery categories get indexed (i.e http://www.tecsew.com/3d-cad-showcase)? Or should I continue to allow Google to trawl through all of it? Or should canonical URL's be used? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Best Wishes, Charlie S
Technical SEO | | media.street0 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
Will invalid HTML code generated by WordPress affect SEO efforts?
Hi all, I'm new to SEOmoz and SEO in general really. I run a small but well regarded freelance website and graphic design business, and until very recently had an employee who handled the SEO side of things. I'm now looking to step into this role myself and hopefully learn the in's and out's of SEO. I've no doubt there will be much to learn, but the SEOmoz tools and it's community seem excellent and helpful. My question then is basically, if WordPress generated HTML code can have an effect on SEO, when it's reported as invalid by tools such as the W3C HTML validator? I'm used to hand coding the majority of my websites for clients, where creating valid HTML and CSS code is something I can do with relative ease. A new client however wants to use WordPress - for ease of updating the site content themselves. The client does however consider any potential SEO implications to be a very important factor in choosing a hand coded vs. WordPress based website. I am aware that WordPress itself is just a means of generating HTML code, and that to the search engines there is no difference between this and the hand coded websites I usually produce. However if WordPress is generating HTML that is being reported as invalid, would this make the search engines penalise the site? On a second note, will the search engines look negatively on a WordPress site where it is being used as a standard website, and the content may not be updated as frequently, as say, a blog? Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing your suggestions.
Technical SEO | | SavilleWolf0 -
How can you get accurate search traffic volumes?
I have been trying to get accurate search volumes for the search term "how to dance" in the UK. The results seems to vary wildly. Please could someone tell me how many people actually search for this term each month in the UK on Google (or any other search engine for that matter!)? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | harrygardiner0 -
How can i get the Authors photo to show in the Google search result?
I added the rel="author" tags to the blog posts last week and updated the authors page with a link to the Google+ account, but I have yet to see the authors photo surface in the Google Results. Example URL: http://spotlight.vitals.com/2011/10/dr-richelle-cooper-testifies-against-dr-conrad-murray-in-trial/ Can anyone identify what else needs to be done?
Technical SEO | | irvingw0 -
Dealing with indexable Ajax
Hello there, My site is basically an Ajax application. We assume lots of people link into deep pages on the site, but bots won't be able to read past the hashmarks, meaning all links appear to go to our home page. So, we have decided to form our Ajax for indexing. And so many questions remain. First, only Google handles indexable Ajax, so we need to keep our static "SEO" pages up for Bing and Yahoo. Bummer, dude, more to manage. 1. How do others deal with the differences here? 2. If we have indexable Ajax and static pages, can these be perceived as duplicate content? Maybe the answer is to disallow google bot from indexing the static pages we made. 3. What does your canonical URL become? Can you tell different search engines to read different canonical URLs? So many more questions, but I'll stop there. Curious if anyone here has thoughts (or experience) on the matter. Erin
Technical SEO | | ErinTM2