What is your opinion in the use of jquery for a continuous scroll type of page layout?

[ChrisAshton]

So, I'm in 2 minds about this; let me start with a bit of background info.

Context
We have a new client who is in the final days of their new site design and were when they first contacted us. Their design essentially uses 5 pages, each with several pages worth of content on each, separated with the use of jquery. What this means is a user can click a menu item from a drop-down in the nav and be taken directly to that section of content like using internal anchor links as if it were a separate page, or they can click the top-level nav item and scroll through each "sub-page" without having to click other links.

Vaguely similar to Google's "How Search Works" page if each sector of that page had it's own URL, only without the heavy design elements and slow load time.

In this process, scrolling down to each new "sub-page" changes the URL in the address bar and is treated as a new page as far as referencing the page, adding page titles, meta descriptions, backlinks etc. From my research this also means search engines don't see the entire page, they see each sub-page as their own separate item like a normal site.

My Reservations I'm worried about this for several reasons, the largest of them being that you're essentially presenting the user with something different to the search engines. The other big one being that I just don't know if search engines really can render this type of formatting correctly or if there's anything I need to look out for here.

Since they're so close to launching their new site, I don't have time to set up a test environment and I'm not going to gamble with a new corporate website but they're also going to be very resistant to the advice of "start the design over, it's too dangerous".

The Positives
For this client in particular, the design actually works very well. Each of these long pages is essentially about a different service they offer and the continuous scrolling through the "sub-pages" acts as almost a workflow through the process, covering each step in order.

It also looks fantastic, loads quickly and has a very simple nav so the overall user experience is great. Since the majority of my focus in SEO is on UX, this is my confusion. Part of me thinks that obscuring the other content on these pages and only showing each individual "sub-page" to search engines is an obvious no-no, the other part of me feels that this kind of user experience and the reasonable prevalence of AJAX/Paralax etc means search engines should be more capable of understanding what's going on here.

Can anyone possibly shed some light on this with either some further reading or first-hand experience?

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Michael, thanks for the input.

I completely agree with you about content length but perhaps I'm a little confused here.

If search engines aren't going to see content hidden by jquery, would that not mean the only content I'm seen to have is what's immediately visible on page load?

[MichaelC-15022]

Google is NOT going to see the content that's rendered by scrolling.  In general, more is better in terms of content on a single page (provided it's not crap of course).  See this article from Search Engine Land.

For those same reasons, having it on separate pages isn't as good an idea.  If you think about how RankBrain is supposed to work, Google is going to be looking for terms on the page that commonly co-occur with the page's primary target search term on other pages on the web about that topic.  So, by farming subsections of content out to other pages, you're shooting yourself in the foot, as Google is only going to give you brownie points for covering the subtopics in the very first page.

A better way to do this:

• put all the content on one page
• in the onload() or the Jquery document ready function, hide all but the first page's worth of content
• now, you can react to a scroll by calling Jscript functions to hide the currently shown content and show the next page's worth...all on the same URL