Websites that scroll....forever....

[DarinPirkey]

I'm seeing more and more websites that have all their content on one page.  I came across www.otbthink.com today and am wondering if I'm missing something here.

I ask this because I am trying to figure out how to link to their copy writing portion of their website.  I have a client that is in their area and needs someone to do some copy writing work for them.  All the content there is being served through css.  The search engines will see it but how do you optimize for this sort of site?  How do you link to a particular section of this site?  Am I missing something obvious here?

Thanks.

[sbaylor]

With so much copy on one page, I'd be concerned about naturally having more than 100 links on that page.

As far as linking to a particular section of the site, you'd want to create named anchors to each particular section. See the following page for examples:

http://www.thesitewizard.com/html-tutorial/link-to-specific-line-or-paragraph.shtml

[DarinPirkey]

Hey Darin, (great name...mine too)

Yes, I can do that if I own a site but I don't even work with them.  I just wanted to share their information with a client of mine.  I can't see how this can be good for SEO or linkability for backlinks.

[BlueLinkERP]

You can link to: http://www.otbthink.com/#section2

That will bring you to the page and jump to that relevant section.

I agree that I don't think the site layout is optimal.

[DarinPirkey]

Thanks for the tip!  That works.

The people who did his website are supposed to be pretty good and they are telling them that this is the way to go for a website.  I'm just puzzled I guess.

The only thing I can think of that may be in play here is the ability to rank for co-citations or something...

They do have a blog and theoretically if it is good then people will link to those sub-pages.  And I can kind of see how people don't really link to your services or other company related pages so building all the links to one URL would be okay...I guess.  I'm just starting to see it more and more but don't know how this would be helpful to the user or the search engines.

[jesse-landry]

These sites are silly i don't understand their popularity. I'd assume the fad will die off sooner or later as it is terrible from an seo standpoint.

[MikeRoberts]

Oh god, I couldn't agree more with you. Infinite Scroll pages/sites just look and feel awful to me from a user standpoint and they detract from sites from an SEO standpoint.

[sbaylor]

Since these rank so poorly, if more companies want to put up long page sites like this, in the end, it makes our jobs working on more focused sites easier, doesn't it?

[DarinPirkey]

Lets just play that out for a second.

If I was going to link to their services pages then I wouldn't use "services" as the anchor text.  I would probably use the company's name (their brand name) because it's their service page.  This sort of website is perfect for that because it will have tons of links to the home URL with the brand name of the website, some with "services" some with "contact" etc.  It wouldn't be hit for over optimization because you have to link to the home page and not a sub-page for these queries.  Also, the blog post on specific topics will have their own sub-pages and those can be handled with SEF URLS and those should rank too with their own links.

I'm playing devils advocate here but I'm wondering if we PURE SEO guys are missing something.