Infinite Scrolling on Publisher Sites - is VentureBeat's implementation really SEO-friendly?

[Daniel_Morgan]

I've just begun a new project auditing the site of a news publisher. In order to increase pageviews and thus increase advertising revenue, at some point in the past they implemented something so that as many as 5 different articles load per article page. All articles are loaded at the same time and from looking in Google's cache and the errors flagged up in Search Console, Google treats it as one big mass of content, not separate pages. Another thing to note is that when a user scrolls down, the URL does in fact change when you get to the next article.

My initial thought was to remove this functionality and just load one article per page. However I happened to notice that VentureBeat.com uses something similar.

They use infinite scrolling so that the other articles on the page (in a 'feed' style) only load when a user scrolls to the bottom of the first article. I checked Google's cached versions of the pages and it seems that Google also only reads the first article which seems like an ideal solution. This obviously has the benefit of additionally speeding up loading time of the page too.

My question is, is VentureBeat's implementation actually that SEO-friendly or not.

VentureBeat have 'sort of' followed Google's guidelines with regards to how to implement infinite scrolling https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html by using prev and next tags for pagination https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en. However isn't the point of pagination to list multiple pages in a series (i.e. page 2, page 3, page 4 etc.) rather than just other related articles?

Here's an example - http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/11/facebooks-cto-explains-social-networks-10-year-mission-global-connectivity-ai-vr/

Would be interesting to know if someone has dealt with this first-hand or just has an opinion.

Thanks in advance!

Daniel

[dohertyjf]

Totally agreed, Daniel! I'd also say it's our job to set expectations and be clear about when something is a test vs when something will more than likely work. Consulting is all about setting expectations!

[Daniel_Morgan]

Thanks a lot for your thoughts on this John. Really appreciate you taking the time to look into it.

You make a great point about not always copying competitors without testing first. If it's rolled out on such a wide scale, it's always going to be a hard case to put to the client knowing that they're going to lose out in the short-term when it comes to advertising revenue but regardless, I think it's our job as SEOs to first and foremost propose the most SEO-friendly implementation possible.

[dohertyjf]

This is actually a really interesting question. I looked at their category pages (eg http://venturebeat.com/tag/ar-vr-weekly/) and those seem to be set up correctly to handle infinite scroll as it sends the search engines to the next page.

I've not come across this with infinite scroll on articles, though. I'm sure they've tested it extensively to figure out the best way to send search engines to future articles, but who really knows if it's being effective. If it's still there, I'd assume that they've seen positive signs but it is definitely a non-standard implementation of rel-next/prev!

This does bring up a good point about copying/not copying a competitor's strategy. They have this implemented, but would it work for your own site/business? Maybe, but maybe not. We can't be sure until we test it ourselves (or speak with someone at VentureBeat who wants to share their learnings :-)). If you know when it was rolled out you could benchmark there and look at SEMrush or another tool to see their organic visibility and from there draw at least some correlation, if not causation.

Thanks for flagging this up! It's cool to see.

[TheSymmetran]

IT depends on application and other design aspects.

I have seen websites that implement the same thing and like morons keep a never accessible footer there as well... you have no idea how impossible it was to get to the social bar/links at the bottom.

You have to think of the user experience to be honest, while there may be good technical reasons for such a design, you must in the end consider what the user goes through and wants to get out of. A/B testing these kinds of things would not hurt either.

But honestly only "feeds" should be this way. Facebook feed, twitter feed, news feed and even then applications should be considered with care.

Disclosure: I personally hate this behavior by default... basically the only place I find it acceptable is on facebook and twitter.