How to deal with everscrolling pages?
-
A website keeps showing more articles when pressing a "load more" button. This loads additional category pages with a page parameter (e.g. ...?page=1, ...?page=2, etc.), as suggested by Google to get all pages indexed.
The problem is that this creates thousands of additional, duplicate pages, with a duplicate title, header, and very unfocused content. They also show as duplicate content in Moz. The pages are indexed by Google, but none of them is ranking. What do you guys think: add a no-follow to the load-more button, so search engines will never see them?
Thanks for your input!
-
Yes, the pages are built just like stated in Google's article. And next/prev doesn't make sense, as the articles are not related. Canonicals are in place and direct to the category or tag page. The problem is that Google keeps on spidering those pages and signals 404- or 500-errors when there's changes or the server is busy. So we agree, I'll put on a noindex/nofollow on the "load more"-button.
Thanks Dirk!
-
Hi
Did you check this article on infinite scrolling from Google Webmaster tools?
Without seeing the actual site it's just guessing - if you have thousands of pages that are listed I guess that it doesn't really make sense to use rel next/previous.
You could consider to only index the first page of the category and put a canonical on the remaining pages.
Are these category pages valuable as landing pages? If not - you could put noindex/follow to make sure that the underlying pages get indexed.
Hope this helps
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
-
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Page in html and Wp as blog
Hello, i have a website in html5 and recently i did a new folder in my site: www.site.com/blog for example, and there i installed Wordpress. I would like to know if that is correct, because 1 have 2 sites different and maybe i had that install WP in blog.site.com ? Must i add www.site.com/blog in WMT? Thanks for all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pompero990 -
Any downsides of (permanent)redirecting 404 pages to more generic pages(category page)
Hi, We have a site which is somewhat like e-bay, they have several categories and advertisements posted by customers/ client. These advertisements disappear over time and turn into 404 pages. We have the option to redirect the user to the corresponding category page, but we're afraid of any negative impact of this change. Are there any downsides, and is this really the best option we have? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vhendriks0 -
Content per page?
We used to have an articles worth of content in a scroll box created by our previous SEO, the problem was that it was very much keyword stuffed, link stuffed and complete crap. We then removed this and added more content above the fold, the problem I have is that we are only able to add 150 - 250 words above the fold and a bit of that is repetition across the pages. Would we benefit from putting an article at the bottom of each of our product pages, and when I say article I mean high quality in depth content that will go into a lot more detail about the product, history and more. Would this help our SEO (give the page more uniqueness and authority rather than 200 - 250 word pages). If I could see one problem it would be would an articles worth of content be ok at the bottom of the page and at that in a div tab or scroll box.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
How to deal with DMCA takedown notices
How do you deal with DMCA takedown notices related to product descriptions? With Google it is simple enough for any person to submit a DMCA takedown notice irrespective if the owner holds right to the content. One such example is this http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=1012391. Although Google dealt in that particular case properly (and did not remove content), we find that nowadays more and more competitors use the DMCA takedowns as an easy way to de-index competitive content. Since the person registering the DMCA takedown does not require to provide any proof of copyright, de-indexing happens quite quickly. Try this URL: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/mydomain.com/ (replace your domain) to see if you have been affected. I would like your opinion if you have been affected by takedowns on product descriptions - in my mind if product descriptions are informative and relate to the characteristics of the product then takedowns should be denied.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MagicDude4Eva1 -
Google Ranking Wrong Page
The company I work for started with a website targeting one city. Soon after I started SEO for them, they expanded to two cities. Optimization was challenging, but we managed to rank highly in both cities for our keywords. A year or so later, the company expanded to two new locations, so now 4 total. At the time, we realized it was going to be tough to rank any one page for four different cities, so our new SEO strategy was to break the website into 5 sections or minisites consisting of 4 city-targeted sites, and our original site which will now be branded as more of a national website. Our URL structures now look something like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cpapciak
www.company.com
www.company.com/city-1
www.company.com/city-2
www.company.com/city-3
www.company.com.city-4 Now, in the present time, all is going well except for our original targeted city. The problem is that Google keeps ranking our original site (which is now national) instead of the new city-specific site we created. I realize that this is probably due to all of the past SEO we did optimizing for that city. My thoughts are that Google is confused as to which page to actually rank for this city's keyword terms and I was wondering if canonical tags would be a possible solution here, since the pages are about 95% identical. Anyone have any insight? I'd really appreciate it!0 -
Not sure why Home page is outranked by less optimized internal pages.
We launched our website just three weeks ago, and one of our primary keyword phrases is "e-business consultants". Here's what I don't get. Our home page is the page most optimized around this search phrase. Using SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool, the home page scores an "A". And yet it doesn't rank in the top 50 on Google Canada, although two other INTERNAL pages - www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-team/ & /www.ebusinessconsultants.ca/about/consulting-approach/ - rank 5 & 6 on Google Canada, even though they only score a grade "C" for on-page optimization for this keyword phrase. I've always understood that the home page is the most powerful page. Why are these others outranking it? I checked the crawl and Google Webmaster, and there is no obvious problem on the home page. Is this because the site is so new? It goes against all previous experience I've had in similar situation. Any guidance/ insight would be highly appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Google swapped our website's long standing ranking home page for a less authoritative product page?
Our website has ranked for two variations of a keyword, one singular & the other plural in Google at #1 & #2 (for over a year). Keep in mind both links in serps were pointed to our home page. This year we targeted both variations of the keyword in PPC to a products landing page(still relevant to the keywords) within our website. After about 6 weeks, Google swapped out the long standing ranked home page links (p.a. 55) rank #1,2 with the ppc directed product page links (p.a. 01) and dropped us to #2 & #8 respectively in search results for the singular and plural version of the keyword. Would you consider this swapping of pages temporary, if the volume of traffic slowed on our product page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JingShack0