Is moving text out of the main body field a bad idea for SEO?
-
Hi,
I manage this WordPress website http://www.the-fireplace-company.co.uk
I've been looking for ways to improve the product template and have come up with the following http://www.the-fireplace-company.co.uk/product/the-alhambra-fireplace/ - you can see how this compares to the old template http://www.the-fireplace-company.co.uk/product/the-burlington-fireplace/
Basically I've moved the description copy for the product from the main body to an alternative field and disabled the reviews tab below the product images to give a more compact feel and better use of the space available in my humble opinion!
The client approves too. However I was just about the change all the other products to match this one - but suddenly thought is is wise to move all text out of the main body just to improve the look? I wondered what impact this might have on search.
Any pointers would be welcomed.
One course of action might be to find a new theme that's just a little more accommodating! Or to develop this theme further to ensure the main body copy is displayed where I want it to be?
Regards to the Moz community - thanks for reading.
Nathan
-
Thanks for clearing that up and for your swift response!
Regards,
Nathan
-
Hi Nathan
The content is still on the page and readable by search engines. Therefore, your move is totally fine from an SEO standpoint.
Sorry I wasn't clear in my answer!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Thanks very much for your thoughts Patrick.
I completely agree, I feel sure the new template is better for UX and will hopefully improve conversions. It seems crazy that the main body copy should appear on this theme below the fold, not to the right of the product images.
I think my concern is still that having absolutely no copy in the main body area of the WordPress dashboard could potentially be bad for SEO. I have had to move the text to a field called 'Product Short Description' for it to appear to the right http://www.the-fireplace-company.co.uk/product/the-alhambra-fireplace/.
If anyone can confirm this one way or the other I'd be very grateful.
Regards,
Nathan
-
Hi there
From the SEO perspective, I like the new way - especially since there was chatter that Google would discount content that's tabbed or expandable. Now, I have heard (and seen) people with this type of content not seeing any issues or fluctuations with rankings at all, so, it's really upto you on that front - just track your performance. It's just something to consider.
Now, more importantly, from a user standpoint, this is much better because I get the description ABOVE the fold and in an area of the page that historically provides a description. I would be interested to hear if your moving content had any effect on conversion rates - I would image it would.
Next time, I would look into A/B testing any changes on your site to see if you are making the right move. While my gut tells me that your moving the content to it's new position will greatly benefit you from a conversion rate perspective, other changes may call for testing and research.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
In seo is it nesseccary ro optimize images as well?
Is it right Image optimization creates many advantages such as better user experience, faster page load times, and additional ranking opportunities. And, it's becoming an increasingly more important role in the website? Because I start a blog https://coinmasterfreespinslinks.com/ and need your suggestions seniors. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | adsdsadsacd0 -
Best .net cms and ecommerce platform for seo?
Hi and thanks for looking. Due to internal constraints we are looking at a .net cms and ecommerce solution, I would have preferred a magento and wordpress solution but we have to work within our constraints. Can anyone share their experiences or thoughts on what cms they would use with seo in mind and what eCommerce platform, again with seo in mind. thanks again for looking and all replies gratefully received.
On-Page Optimization | | Renford_Nelson1 -
Our SEO suggests thinning our homepage - is this a good idea?
We provide a single medical service in London. Our domain is "service"london.co.uk. Our home page consists of: Welcome message (40 words) Reasons why customers choose us (720 words) - as bullet points Benefits of the service (380 words - as 6 subheadings) Then a small sample of testimonials It currently looks word doc boring so that's definitely an area we are talking to our designer about. We currently rank second or third for our most popular keywords which are mostly variations of "service london" - these go straight to our home page. Our competitors do the same. The only other pages that rank are /pricing (for "service london price") and /reviews (for a tiny proportion of rarer keywords) The main variations in the services we provide is adult and children. We have /adults and /children pages for this where we describe the actual procedures (these are relatively new pages so perhaps they will rank for "adult/children service london" in the future, but right now, they still go to the home page). Now our SEO agency suggests we spread the content into more pages: Why us page, Benefits of service page etc., (also suggested we add more high quality content pages). Our home page will be similar to what moz suggested on whiteboard Friday - a few key points then directing them towards the sub-pages to read more. However I am unsure if this is suitable for us where the great majority of our organic traffic comes from "service london". These visitors should ideally still come to our home page and I'm not sure if Google will be thrilled that my home page is now poorer in terms of content despite the fact that the home page still links to these high quality pages on my site. Would really appreciate this beautiful community's insights on this. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | LondonAli0 -
Using Escaped Fragments with SEO
Our e-commerce platform is in the process of changing to what we call app based stores (essentially running in a browser as single page web-app) With these new stores they are being built in HTML 5 and using escaped fragments.
On-Page Optimization | | marketing_zoovy.com
Currently merchants are usually running 2 stores until we launch to app site at 100%. My questions are really concerning the app stores which right now show on a subdomain but will essentially take over the primary domain. Here is an example:
app.tikimater.com and app.sportsworld.com Since I am not a developer, I'm really having a hard time understanding the escaped fragments. I'm using this but https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started I'm not sure what my actual urls should look like and what the canonical should be set to. Right now they have been removed but previously they had http:app.tikimaster.com#!v=1 Also, and how I should be setting up my meta information for Google so 1) pages are indexed timely 2) pages are indexed with the correct information. I am still setting the meta titles and descriptions but in some instances Google uses other info. With the new platform we are moving away from on page content (written paragraphs) but category pages would have related products embedded. Should I still be pushing to have some type of intro text, since it would solely be for SEO and not the shoppers experience. All product pages have content (product description etc) Thank you for any advice0 -
Google index text that I can not find
Hello everybody, As you can see here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G-iicHoDJeYJ:www.billigste-internet.dk/&hl=da&gl=dk&strip=1 Google index the text "Forside" as the H1 tag, and "Right" and "Left" as body text, on my website. But I do not want that Google indexes this. But when I look in mine source code (see here: view-source:http://www.billigste-internet.dk/) I can not find "Forside", "rigth" or "Left", so I can delete it. Is there anyone who can help me where I need to delete the text "Forside", "Right" and "Left", so Google does not index this text? Hope someone can help.
On-Page Optimization | | JoLindahl910 -
On-page SEO optimization
hi there! Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization, metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition? Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number) in order to discard indexing problems? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr1 -
What is html text?
I am using the "page attributes" tool for a guideline for what I am filling in on each page of my website. I feel like I've done my homework on this, but I can't figure out what "html text" is. URL Page Title Meta Description Meta Keywords H1 H2 **HTML Text ** ... not sure what to put here, how long it should be, what it's purpose is, etc. Any SEOMoz links helping me figure that out? I'm not finding it in the "Basics of Search Engine Design" article posted here on SEOMoz.
On-Page Optimization | | amandahx20 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0