Does anyone have any tips for SEO in WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM?
-
Hi I'm working on performing SEO on a portal that's implemented on WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM.
Now WebSphere Portal comes with some limitations such as non-pretty urls among other things. Portal also generates non-normalized urls, so you have to turn on a process for detecting and normalizing urls for the Googlebot, etc.
Does anyone have any experience with SEO in this platform, and could offers me a few tips for this specific platform?
Thank you
-
Thanks for your input. It's just as I though apparently we should re-think our strategy into using the WCM servlet directly instead of through Portal. When WCM is used through Portal via the WCM portlet the content item is fetched through that WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter, but the parameter itself seems less relevant to Google.
I'll look into this. Thank you for all your help.
-
The NCAA site does seem to be pretty well put together. Like you said, their TITLE changes from page to page, which you need for decent SEO. Also, once you figure that out, you should also be changing your META description tag within the HEAD on each page on your site, so it describes that page you're on. In the meantime, I would recommend removing your meta description altogether from all of your pages if you can't set it on a page by page basis. That way, the search engines will try to pick out the most relevant text from your pages (and relating to the user's search query) instead of always using "Auto Insurance from Universal Insurance Group Trusted. Fast. Service." (also you're missing some punctuation here between Group and Trusted).
Working within this platform, one thing which the NCAA site is doing well,which I think you could try to do is to get that nasty session parameter out of your URLs. I think you only need that if you're tracking the user's session? The NCAA site doesn't include it until I click the member login link. Since the Googlebot won't be signing in, if you can manage to get rid the these parameters when people aren't signed in, that would improve the SEO of your URLs.
The more of these random directories you can get out of the URLs, the better. So it looks like the way it's configured right now, is the URL doesn't change, except for the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter at the end, which is setting the content of the page? The NCAA site is getting the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter to appear at the end of the URL, like it should be, rather than as a parameter. That is much more natural, and I would imagine Google rather see keywords in the URLs rather than in parameters in URLs.
-
Hi and thank you for your help. The site in question is the following: http://www.universalpr.com/
In this platform the URL holds session information such as the language, navigational state, among other things. Now this platform has a normalization process that detects the user-agent and looks for bots such as the Googlebot. Once portal detects a crawler bot it strips out most of the session information out of the URL. The end result is still not pretty, but it aims for consistency otherwise you could get a huge number of URLs that reference the same content.
When using WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM (the CMS) content is displayed as modules or sections of the page that are called portlets; such portlets don't have direct access to the HEAD. This makes using canonical URLs is a bit challenge. However we're working on finding a way to write to the HEAD for updating the TITLE and adding canonical elements to the pages.
The following are two other examples that use this platform:
- http://www.ncaa.org/ - This site uses WCM stand alone and it redirects to WebSphere Portal only whenever necessary (i.e. the login). The benefits of this approach is that they can use canonical elements and that the can update their titles depending on which content is being displayed.
- http://miamidade.gov/ - Miami Dade is a lot similar to my example; which is www.universalpr.com. In Miami Dade's case the use the Lotus WCM portlet. If you click around this site you'll see that their Title is always the same and that they don't use canonical elements in their page either.
It goes without saying that I could benefit from using the NCAA's approach, however this would require quite a bit of re-work.
These are some of the shortcomings that I can identify with my limited experience in SEO. If you need any more details at all please let me know.
Thank you,
-
Let me preface this by saying I don't have any experience with WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM. If you could describe more about what the platform outputs, or know of a site using it, I could take a look.
Non-pretty URLs aren't great, but they're not the worst either. If you're stuck with 'em, you're stuck with 'em. According to the SEOMOZ 2011 rankings report, having keywords in the URLs are still pretty important (69.9/100).
One way to work around the non-canonicalization of the URLs is including rel=canonical tags to all of your pages. That way, when Google comes across a non-normalized URL, you'll have the canonical tag to tell it the right page to pass the Pagerank to. Provided you always know what the normalized URL is supposed to be for non-normalized pages, this makes it easy to always have the Pagerank going to the right page. Even if the normalized version rel=canonicals to itself, Matt Cutts gives that the aok (video here). If you have a procedure that's working to normalize URLs, that's best, since we never know what's going to happen next.
More sources about rel=canonical: Google Webmaster Tools help and Webmaster Central Blog.
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
-
Do old website files in the public_html effect SEO?
My client has about a dozen old folders filled with old websites including index files, robots, htaccess files. They are all located in separate files with in public_html. Does this effect them negatively?
Technical SEO | | Renalynd0 -
Do Letters With Accents Affect SEO?
Hi Guys, My company has a franchise of a foreign company that uses an accent/foreign letter in its brand name. We have to refer to this franchise with this symbol on our website to meet their standards. I've done some research on this but its not conclusive, so i was wondering whether anyone here can confirm this for me; Will using the letter with this symbol impair our rankings for this franchise name? Obviously as a UK business people search for this franchise with a regular letter and not the accented one. I would have thought that Google is clever enough to recognise the meaning of the accented letter by now and therefore it wouldn't affect rankings (much). Furthermore, do you think that it would make any difference to use the HTML element to represent the accent rather than copy and pasting the symbol onto our website? I would've thought this would help Google pick it up, but it might not make a difference anyway! Any help is appreciated. Thanks Sam
Technical SEO | | Sandicliffe1 -
Can a CMS affect SEO?
As the title really, I run www.specialistpaintsonline.co.uk and 6 months ago when I first got it it had bad links which google had put a penalty against it so losts it value. However the penalty was lift in Sept, the site corresponds to all guidelines and seo work has been done and constantly monitored. the issue I have is sales and visits have not gone up, we are failing fast and running on 2 or 3 sales a month isn't enough to cover any sort of cost let alone wages. hence my question can the cms have anything to do with it? Im at a loss and go grey any help or advice would be great. thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TeamacPaints0 -
Anyone See This Before? Google Following Links that are Not Hyperlinks
Today I was going through my Google Webmaster URL Errors (404s) info. I came across two links in my URL Errors report that are NOT actually hyperlinks on the source page. Both of these links are from two different forum-type websites. In both cases, the post references a URL on my website (incorrectly, hence the 404 error) in the text of the post but did NOT actually link to my site. I looked at the source code...no href. Both forum posts simply had a tag or tag around the incorrect URL text referencing my site. I have never seen this before or heard that Google will follow a URL that is not actually a hyperlink. Anyone else?
Technical SEO | | cajohnson0 -
Can anyone explain why and how these odd URLs could be working?
In our GWT and Google Analytics traffic reports, I often see some very oddly formed URLs. Here's an example http://www.ccisolutions.com/storefront/www.ccisolutions.com and here's another
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat What strikes me about this particular URL is two things: It renders this page http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/on-disc-printing, but not with that URL, the URL stays http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat When I break this URL into pieces http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat,
both redirect to: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/on-disc-printing This makes me wonder, is there something (a rule?) in the
backend (maybe the .htaccess file?)that was set up that says http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
= www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat
(or maybe vice versa?), and as a result an odd URL for the page is being
written automatically? This scenario worked on every category page I checked. All had the same results. For example, I tried: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat
and it rendered the Live Sound category page, but without redirecting to the
user friendly URL. This URL stayed unchanged in the address bar When I broke it into pieces, like http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/AAA.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat, both of these redirected to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/sound-video-lighting-equipment-experts Have any of you ever encountered a problem like this? Any sugeestions as to what might be causing it and how to remedy the problem? It is definitely causing us a duplicate content headache. Thanks! Dana0 -
Can anyone recommend an SEO friendly Joomla extension to use for SEO on an existing website?
Can anyone recommend an SEO friendly Joomla extension to use for SEO on an existing website? I have downloaded sh404sef but I don't want to change my URL's and make them longer than they are at the moment. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Are there any SEO implications if a page does two 301s and then a 304?
Curious to see if this is a positive or negative thing for SEO...or even perhaps, neutral. h9SZz
Technical SEO | | RodrigoStockebrand0 -
Tips on How to Optimize a Forum
Hi, I am looking for some good tips and tricks on how to get the most of a vBulletin Forum, we already got vbseo.com which works quite nice for text/titles and many other stuff, but it would be great to know some insights on optimizing this kind of forums or any other forum. thanks!
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0