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
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
-
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
How to Handle Subdomains with Irrelevant Content
Hi Everyone, My company is currently doing a redesign for a website and in the process of planning their 301 redirect strategy, I ran across several subdomains that aren't set up and are pointing to content on another website. The site is on a server that has a dedicated IP address that is shared with the other site. What should we do with these subdomains? Is it okay to 301 them to the homepage of the new site, even though the content is from another site? Should we try to set them up to go to the 404 page on the new site?
Technical SEO | | PapercutInteractive0 -
What about Panoramic content ?
Hello everyone ,, We have a website include a panoramic images for many pages this panorama is really unique and we did a hard work to collect it , we thought that will be very useful for our target audience !! We have tried to search about how to make a panoramic content working and support the SEO , Unfortunately NO result and NO information yet, _Could you help us in that filed _ _Thanks _
Technical SEO | | Visual-ex0 -
Duplicate Content
We have a ton of duplicate content/title errors on our reports, many of them showing errors of: http://www.mysite.com/(page title) and http://mysite.com/(page title) Our site has been set up so that mysite.com 301 redirects to www.mysite.com (we did this a couple years ago). Is it possible that I set up my campaign the wrong way in SEOMoz? I'm thinking it must be a user error when I set up the campaign since we already have the 301 Redirect. Any advice is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Ditigal_Taylor0 -
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 -
How to prevent duplicate content in archives?
My news site has a number of excerpts in the form of archives based on categories that is causing duplicate content problems. Here's an example with the nutrition archive. The articles here are already posts, so it creates the duplicate content. Should I nofollow/noindex this category page along with the rest and 2011,2012 archives etc (see archives here)? Thanks so much for any input!
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Canonicalisation - Best Approach?
Hi I have been reading into canonicalisation and I am looking for professional advice and guidance on the best approach as there are many conflicting views on how to implement a solution. I have added to the homepage http://www.cheapfindergames.com/" /> so that http://cheapfindergames.com and index.php redirects to the www version. Or would it be better using .htaccess if this is the case what code would be needed to achieve the above? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Duplicate Content via a product feed & data
We have uniquely created all of our product content on our website (Titles, product descriptions, images etc). However, we are also a manufacturer of these products and supply to a number of trade customers. These customers often wish to setup their own websites to re-sell these products. In the past we have quite happily given this content in order to assist our customers sell on their sites. Generally we give them a 'data dump' of our web data and images, but reading about duplicate content this will lead to the search engines seeing lots of identical content on these customer sites. Whilst we wish to support our customers we do not want to harm our (and their) site by issuing lots of duplicate content around the web. Is there a way we can help them with the data without penalizing ourselves? The other issue is that we also take this data feed and use it to sell on both Amazon & Googlebase. Will using this identical data also rank as duplicate content as a quick search does show both our website and amazon product page? When creating Amazon listing do these need to vary from the standard website descriptions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bwfc770