Troubled QA Platform - Site Map vs Site Structure
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I'm running a Q&A forum that was built prioritizing UX over SEO. This decision has cause a bit of a headache as we're 6 months into the project with 2278 Q&A pages with extremely minimal traffic coming from search engines.
The structure has the following hiccups:
A. The category navigation from the main Q&A page is entirely javascript and only navigable by users.
B. We identify Google bots and send them to another version of the Q&A platform w/o javascript.
- Category links don't exist in this google bot version of the main Q&A page.
- On this Google version of the main Q&A page, the Pinterest-like tiles displaying individual Q&As are capped at 10. This means that the only way google bot can identify link juice being passed down to individual QAs (after we've directed them to this page) is through 10 random Q&As.
C. All 2278 of the QAs are currently indexed in search. They are just indexed very very poorly in SERPs. My personal assumption, is that Google can't pass link juice to any of the Q&As (poor SERP) but registers them from the site map so it gets included in Google's index.
My dilemma has me struggling between two different decisions:
1. Update the navigation in the header to remove the javascript and fundamentally change the look and feel of the Q&A platform. This will allow Google bot to navigate through Expert category links to pass link juice to all Q&As.
or
2. Update the redirected main Q&A page to include hard coded category links with 100s of hard coded Q&As under each category page. Make it similar, ugly, flat and efficient for the crawling bots.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I need to find a solution as soon as possible.
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Hi,
Thanks for the question.
In terms of the two decisions you've outlined, I'd definitely go with number 1. Putting a proper structure in place is essential and it sounds like doing this will remove all of the problems you're seeing with pages not being given enough equity in order to rank.
It can also be a bit dangerous to show users one version of the page and crawlers another version. Even though it sounds like you're not being manipulative, the search engines can sometimes think that you're cloaking and penalise you for it. So this is another reason to switch to a proper navigation structure and make it really clean and easy for users and crawlers to get to all pages on the website.
I hope that helps!
Paddy
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