How not to get penalized by having a Single Page Interface (SPI) ?

[pqdbr]

Guys, I run a real estate website where my clients pay me to advertise their properties.

The thing is, from the beginning, I had this idea about a user interface that would remain entirely on the same page. On my site the user can filter the properties on the left panel, and the listings (4 properties at each time) are refreshed on the right side, where there is pagination.

So when the user clicks on one property ad, the ad is loaded by ajax below the search panel in the same page .. there's a "back up" button that the user clicks to go back to the search panel and click on another property.

People are loving our implementation and the user experience, so I simply can't let go of this UI "inovation" just for SEO, because it really is something that makes us stand out from our competitors.

My question, then, is: how not to get penalized in SEO by having this Single Page Interface, because in the eyes of Google users might not be browsing my site deep enough ?

[ShaMenz]

Hi,

Google and Bing can see how much time your users spend on the page, and since they can also see that there is a large amount of information accessible through that page, I don't think you need to be as worried about the "single page" factor as normal.

That said, just because your main user interface lives within a single page, there is no reason that you cannot have other pages linked to it. In fact there are a number of other pages which should be included in your site. For example: Contact, About, Terms, Privacy Policy and (if relevant) Disclosure and/or Disclaimer. They do not have to be right up front or included in your main UI, but they should at least be available for users as text links at the bottom of the page, in a sidebar or somewhere. If you don’t include them you are reducing the appearance of transparency for the site. This works against trust and will make people less confident about doing business through your site. Given that you are in real estate, these things should be a major consideration.

Also, if you do not have an About page, you are reducing your opportunity to grow your customer base and add more clients.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[john4math]

If you have your listings available in an unordered list, that should be fine.  If there aren't hundreds and hundreds of listings on your site, I don't think Google will have a problem with your implementation.  If there are, you might consider building static pages for each category, and linking to the listings from there.

[pqdbr]

John, thanks for the quick reply.

I had already read the "make your Ajax page indexable", but unfortunately it was too late in product development and our programmers simply convinced us it would imply re-doing the entire backend for it to work.

So we already have in place a workaround for crawlers reach all these listings. Below the search panel (that has Ajax pagination and loads the ads on the same page with javascript) we have a standard html

So the crawlers can reach the properties individual pages. In other words, we comply with the rule "make each of your pages reachable by at least one internal link".

But my question was more focused about how google "sees" the navigation pattern of my users ... I know the crawler is reaching those pages, but since the majority of users use the search panel (that loads the properties by javascript/ajax) and not the static links below it, it might appear that the users only viewed one page inside our site.

[john4math]

Is there some alternate navigation to reach all of these listings without using your AJAX search?  Or are the listings included in a sitemap?  Is there some way for Google to find them already?

I'd recommend reading http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/ to learn more about how to make your AJAXy pages indexable.  You may also want to take a look at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html if you have prev and next pagination.  If you have a view all, and want to make that the canonical form, you'll want to look at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

Also, in Bing Webmaster Tools, you can go to the Crawl > Crawl Settings tab and enable the "Configure your site to have bingbot crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #!." option if that's applicable to you.