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
-
Homepage Deindexed?
Hi guys, One site we have been working on which is: https://tinyurl.com/j5m8vld Homepage seems to be deindexed by Google Australia. From initial perspective it seems it could be high velocity of links too soon, but not 100% sure as there are no messages in GWT. It could be duplicate content issues as we found duplication of the homepage e.g. https://tinyurl.com/zzds5mf which is the exact same as the homepage. However, don't think this would cause the homepage to be indexed which had strong rankings before it was deindexed (ranking for 100 keywords). Any suggestions would be very much appreciated! Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Content Internal Linking ?
Should we internally link new content to old content using anchor tags (keywords) related to pages from all new blogposts or should be keep rotating the blogposts like link from some blog posts & not from others. What ratio should we maintain. Right now i keep 2 links maximum from a 300 words posts or 3 in 500 words posts maximum. But linking from each new blog posts will be good?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
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 -
Opinion on Duplicate Content Scenario
So there are 2 pest control companies owned by the same person - Sovereign and Southern. (The two companies serve different markets) They have two different website URLs, but the website code is actually all the same....the code is hosted in one place....it just uses an if/else structure with dynamic php which determines whether the user sees the Sovereign site or the Southern site....know what I am saying? Here are the two sites: www.sovereignpestcontrol.com and www.southernpestcontrol.com. This is a duplicate content SEO nightmare, right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MeridianGroup0 -
How does google recognize original content?
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website. However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content. I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic. What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serkie1 -
Expired Content
Hi We have a listing website that has a huge amount of listings.These listings are changing all time, they become passive or deleted. We would like to choose the response code for the passive for deleted pages. Which response type must we use ? Redirect to last category with 301 Give 410 Gone response code Give 404 Response code which option would we choose ? and any ideas ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEMTurkey0 -
Duplicate Content Help
seomoz tool gives me back duplicate content on both these URL's http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/index.php I want to use http://www.mydomain.com/football-teams/ as this just look nice & clean. What would be best practice to fix this issue? Kind Regards Eddie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780