Question Concerning HTML5/CSS Templates & Google Mobility Issues
-
Hi all,
Looking for some kind of solution for a responsive update for a site and I am wondering if there are any templates (not Wordpress) that are both great SEO wise and would also pass muster with the impending Google update for responsiveness? I was looking at things like Canvas and Porto ( http://themeforest.net/popular_item/by_category?category=site-templates ) but can't find any discussion on whether or not these things have been addressed with any of these templates. If any of you have suggestions or other places to look for something that could possibly fit the bill (even if temporarily) I would be very appreciative. Thank you so much in advance!
-
Oh by the way, here's a post I wrote for Moz on setting up wordpress for SEO: http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success
-
Hi There
In my experience, so long as you redirect any URL changes correctly you shouldn't see a drop in rankings. A good coder should be able to clean up a template, as well as take measuers to help with load time. Definitely use a caching plugin like WP Super Cache. I think WordPress is a great way to go for a quick solution. A premium theme is only about $50 - go with one that is from a developer that a) has really good star ratings and b) and this is important - seems to provide good support.
-
Hi,
Not really a great coder myself, but I am building a smaller site as kind of hobby project, trying to incorporate all the best practices of RWD. My first approach as my skills in CSS & HTML were quite limited was to buy a template on Themeforest. I noticed very soon however, that modifying these templates is quite difficult to do, and it's even harder to understand exactly what each element in the css is used for (there was no documentation inside the css)
When I ran some checks with external tools, I noticed that for all the templates only 30% of the css was actually used. Load times were pretty mediocre, mainly because the huge number of external javascripts used for all the fancy stuff on the page. Maybe I bought the wrong template, but my general impression is that these templates are developed based on frameworks which are already quite bloated (Bootstrap, Foundation) - and then they add a lot of additional jquery plugins for things like sliders, responsive menus, ...etc.
If you just need a temporary fix - you could try one of these templates - they are cheap & functional, even if they do not fit your needs for 100%. For the final version, it's probably better/cheaper to find a great designer/coder to build your code from scratch rather (or based on a very light css framework) than to clean the code in the template.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Thanks so much for the comments...really appreciated. For many years we've just had basic html sites without any kind of CMS (right now it's html5). I guess I'm a bit weary of Wordpress because of the SEO aspect; and that's purely from years ago hearing that it was only a blogging mechanism. I fully realize that's not the case and it's used by companies big and small but I suppose some of the fear comes from the fact that the site in question ranks very well organically and I was worried that any kind of big change like that could make us drop.
Anyway, regardless of what happens, you mention something about the templates being stuffed with too much junk but I'm wondering if we used one of those (if only temporarily) if we could hire a good coder to clean it up if that turns out to be the case? Really right now we are just looking for a quick solution that could possibly be made to last but doesn't necessarily have to.
Anyway, thanks again. Really appreciate the assistance.
-
Hi There
Dirk is right - most responsive templates should pass the mobile test. If not WordPress, are you on a different CMS or something?
Themeforest.net has a ton of themes for all situations. Just look for "responsive".
-
Hi
If the template is marked as responsive it should pass the mobile friendly test. Main issue with these templates is that they are very often stuffed with a lot of features that you're not going to use (resulting in heavy css / js files). This could have a negative impact on the load time of your page. That said, I guess most people just buy Wordpress themes rather than develop themselves.
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Are these doorway pages or not? Concerned due to Panda 4.0
For a new site we're building, the Products team wants the header (let's call this Product-Header) to have links to every subsection of every section on every page. Since this is a bad idea, I want Product-Header to be coded in such a way that it doesn't appear in the code or the links are nofollow, noindex. I want to instead create static versions of these pages without the Product-Header. The homepage links to the static URL section pages, those main section pages link to static subsection pages, and so on. It's one nice silo. I am concerned though that Google won't like this due to these static pages are being created specifically for search engines. Users could click through to this static parallel site from the homepage, or they could use the dynamic URL site. This is similar to what etsy.com is doing where you can search Google for "mermaid bridal" and get this page https://www.etsy.com/market/mermaid_bridal but the dynamic version of the page does not show up. However you can search on etsy.com for " mermaid bridal" and get https://www.etsy.com/search?q=mermaid bridal&ship_to=US. Could these static versions that show up in search engines be seen as doorway pages? I know ebay.com got spanked for doorway pages and I don't want to do anything that would get this site penalized.
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Without Keyword Info From Google - How do we re-do a site not knowing what to keep?
Bit of a riddle I am trying to figure out here... I have a client that receives some visits via organic searches (around 700). Most of which are to the homepage. The client isn't actively targeting any keywords yet (on purpose) and the homepage doesn't have much on it. I've been hired to do keyword research and re-develop the site but this is the first site I've done since google really put the hurt on keyword information. My worry is that without knowing what keywords people are using currently to search and find the site, I will be potentially deleting information that is bringing in traffic. Looking at the traffic and other keywords I can view I think the keywords are branded which makes it a bit easier but again, it is a bit worrisome, not so much for this client but for future work. Anyone have any ideas other than looking at webmaster tools and landing pages?
Web Design | | JoshBowers20120 -
Responsive Web Design WordPress Template Suggestions
Does anyone have any RWD WP templates they would suggest? It's for a friend of mine that is starting a local solar panel installation company. For the beginning, he likely will not have more than a handful of categories and subcategories. I'd say no more than 50 total pages. Any suggestions would help. He doesn't want to spend more than $50 - $100, but he's not married to that figure if it's worth it. Thanks everyone, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Best Practice For Website Redesign & Migration
Hi, I'm looking to redesign my current live website to a new Wordpress site using "Studiopress Enterprise Theme". I'm new to Wordpress and therefore will be embarking on lots of testing & development.
Web Design | | Mark_Ch
I do not want to hurt my current live website whilst testing the new Wordpress site. However, it would be nice to bring the test site into the current live environment without changing untold urls, etc. Question
What is the best practice to setup this new Wordpress environment for my domain: www.sampledomain.co.uk How would you restrict Google, Bing, etc from indexing, etc. whilst testing in the live environment. What other consideration should I be aware of Thanks Mark0 -
Need help to implement microdata/microformat for ecommerce site
**Can somebody please help me to implement microdata/microformats codes for our ecommerce product pages? **
Web Design | | EastEssence22
Please guide me if you have some CSS example for the same. Thanks.0 -
Homepage and Category pages rank for article/post titles after HTML5 Redesign
My site's URL (web address) is: http://bit.ly/g2fhhC Timeline:
Web Design | | mcluna
At the end of March we released a site redesign in HTML5
As part of the redesign we used multiple H1s (for nested articles on the homepage) and for content sections other than articles on a page. In summary, our pages have many many, I mean lots of H1's compared to other sites notable sites that use HTML5 and only one H1 (some of these are the biggest sites on the web) - yet I don't want to say this is the culprit because the HTML5 document outline (page sections) create the equivalent of H1 - H6 tags. We have also have been having Google cache snapshot issues due to Modernzr which we are working to apply the patch. https://github.com/h5bp/html5-boilerplate/issues/1086 - Not sure if this would driving our indexing issues as below. Situation:
Since the redesign when we query our article title then Google will list the homepage, category page or tag page that the article resides on. Most of the time it ranks for the homepage for the article query.
If we link directly to the article pages from a relevant internal page it does not help Google index the correct page. If we link to an article from an external site it does not help Google index the correct page. Here are some images of some example query results for our article titles: Homepage ranks for article title aged 5 hours
http://imgur.com/yNVU2 Homepage ranks for article title aged 36 min.
http://imgur.com/5RZgB Homepage at uncategorized page listed instead of article for exact match article query
http://imgur.com/MddcE Article aged over 10 day indexing correctly. Yes it's possible for Google index our article pages but again.
http://imgur.com/mZhmd What we have done so far:
-Removed the H1 tag from the site wide domain link
-Made the article title a link. How it was on the old version so replicating
-Applying the Modernizr patch today to correct blank caching issue. We are hoping you can assess the number H1s we are using on our homepage (i think over 40) and on our article pages (i believe over 25 H1s) and let us know if this may be sending a confusing signal to Google. Or if you see something else we're missing. All HTML5 and Google documentation makes clear that Google can parse multiple H1s & understand header, sub & that multiple H1s are okay etc... but it seems possible that algorythmic weighting may not have caught up with HTML5. Look forward to your thoughts. Thanks0 -
Can google crawl text in jquery sliders?
We are redesigning our website and want to present a fair amount of text within jquery sliders. Will google crawl this text or is it treated the same way as actual script? Perhaps there is a way to just have the text as plain html but use jquery to display it?
Web Design | | Netboost0 -
How to serve a Mobile & Full Site using one URL?
Hello, Does anyone know of any resources or tutorials that outline how to serve a smartphone-formatted website using the same URL as the full site? I know that one solution is using media-queries to serve a seperate CSS stylesheet, but you still have the full HTML source code. In other words, I might want to serve a smartphone & desktop user different content, but under one URL. WP Touch (Wordpress Plugin) is a perfect example of what I mean, but how is it technically achieved? It serves two different sets of HTML for smartphone & full, but using one URL http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch-pro/
Web Design | | petecampbell-bmi0