Parallax websites - good for SEO?

[wojkwasi]

A client of mine is redesigning their site using a vertical Parallax & upon doing some research I've stumbled across Drew Barrymore's site: http://flowerbeauty.com/ - which also uses Parallax.

What I like in particular is that the site changes URLs as you scroll down. If you go direct to one of those URLs you'll notice unique meta data (albeit poorly optimised). All pages are indexed fine in Google (https://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=f8873f78dfbb8c5e&q=site:flowerbeauty.com)

I'm just wondering if this is considered ok as the user experience is good and they're not doing anything manipulative, however, there's duplicate content and a potential case of cloaking at hand.

I think this approach may be ok for my client for a product features page or a global office locations page since I can break up the sections nicely and split a really long page featuring a lot of content into separate URLs. Whereas Flower Beauty have done it across the whole site... i.e. one page of HTML = the whole site.

What do you guys think?

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Woj,

Good luck on your project! I created a board with Seo Parallax Responsive Websites. Please add your project to the board if you get it too work! http://www.pinterest.com/ecumbre/seo-and-parallax-scrolling/

thanks

Carla

[wojkwasi]

Hi Carla - Thanks for doing that! I agree, their site is not very SEO friendly. Their big mistake is running the whole site (essentially) from one page. Which mean that every page is duplicate or a duplicate subset of the main set.

We looked at only incorporating a handful of elements from the site (well really only the URL switching as you scroll down & ensuring we have unique content).

For example, we have a parallax /features page which has an overview then each feature as you scroll. If you go direct to /features you get the overview only. If you go direct to /features/feature-1 then you only get info about that feature.

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Woj,

I know you posted this awhile back but I decided to run flowerbeauty.com through moz's software. It is not SEO friendly. I have the reports if you want to see them. Feel free to PM me and I will send them to you.

Lots of duplicate content

http://imgur.com/YEb6bmZ

Hope it is not too late

[wojkwasi]

We're playing around with a few of the technologies that site uses & will run some experiments. Fun!

[SEO-Buzz]

Evaluate what SEO assets the dynamic URL structure provides to support SEO and which it does not. Carla pointed out some excellent points. But I did notice that there is no rel canonical specified and that the head disappears off the view-source when you get off the home page. I wonder how authorship and publisher could be implemented (less SEO and more visitor engagement, but still something to consider.). If you find that most SEO elements are available in the structure and you can hold rank using those elements, then "perfect" or "complete" SEO structure may not be necessary. Each industry seems to have its own tolerance for how well you can rank when you don't have all SEO elements in place.

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Woj,

I took a look at the website and did some research. Google is treating each URL differently and the internal pages are ranking. It appears to be SEO friendly and an amazing solution to Parallax scrolling and SEO. However that being said I am not a programmer. I would need to sit down with a programmer to look at some of the code. If you have one on your team these are the questions I would ask him or her.

1. How is the URL change activated? Is it done with Ajax? From what I can see, the main navigation is a list and the scrolling activates the jump to a new place in the list. Each list element is a new URL.
2. Does the website have an XML sitemap? I do not see one and I would feed this to Google webmaster tools. The site does have a SEO friendly architecture (the titles and metas could be improved a bit) and Google is picking this up

I do think it is ok to dynamically change the URL as you scroll and find it to be a wonderful balance between SEO and Parallax scrolling.

Thanks Carla

[wojkwasi]

Hi Carla - thanks for your response. I guess, my main question is related to the specific technique they used in the Flower Beauty site example. Is it ok to dynamically change the URL as you scroll? If you view the source of each URL you get unique meta data... it's a cool technique if it's ok with the SEs, which so far appears to be the case.

[Carla_Dawson]

Hi Woj,

You have got to read my Youmoz post on how to do a SEO friendly parallax scrolling responsive website http://moz.com/ugc/website-design-wars-seo-agencies-vs-web-design-agencies-worldwide-trends

Our project went really well

Feel free to private message me if you need more insights.

[ReferralCandy]

While Parallax design can be a great experience for users, you will have to take into consideration its SEO consequences and page load speed. When implemented for an entire website, using a one page design will be problematic since you can only have one

tag. Flower Beauty's website solves this problem by loading multiple pages in one page, but at the cost of speed as vagish mentioned. You would also have to take into consideration that parallax design doesn't work well on mobile devices, and a separate mobile site will have to be created in that case.

I would recommend using Parallax design for specific pages only (e.g. product features page). It would load much faster if its just a one page design and you would definitely want to captivate your visitors in the product features page.

Here's a link that may be helpful to you when looking at SEO concerns: http://searchengineland.com/the-perils-of-parallax-design-for-seo-164919

Hope that helps!

[vagish]

One issue I found was the speed. Also I don't think I've actually seen any sites ranking highly while using a parallax style theme. I actually built a site with a parallax site for a client (but he didn't care about SEO).

It took 15 seconds to load her site: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/flowerbeauty.com/tVCtPPl3 with nearly 300 HTTP requests. If I remember correctly you can only have 8 HTTP requests running concurrently per domain. These requests can be reduced by better caching and css image sprites.

From an SEO point of view I can't really say, but maybe having a look at lots of similar websites would be useful.