Infinite Scrolling Long Lists and SEO

[cbielich]

Just curious if anyone else has tried this. I have pages with words that link to definitions. I have A LOT of them on a page and I am starting the process of trying to either do pagination (which I cant stand) or even cooler infinite scrolling where the page loads more words as the user scrolls.

Good Bad for SEO?

[malecce]

Hi

i's a process similar that we used in app device, when somebody scroll we show the results.

I think that have all in the same page, if i understand correct is not good for a Seo

Ciao

maurizio

[cbielich]

Yeah I was reading about it and its because since not all the content loads for the Googlebot it is going to miss stuff...ugh

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think unfortunately  pagination would be by far the best tactic.

Not only would Google bot failed to keep crawling and less the domain already had extremely high page rank but you would unfortunately have a real lot of trouble getting people to where they want to be if they're navigating your website.

If I may ask did you also have the question regarding Penguin and panda URLs?

all the best,

Tom

[cbielich]

Nope that wasn't me

[BlueprintMarketing]

Sorry about that didn't mean to get off topic.

Hope everything goes well with the new website.

All best,

Tom

[CleverPhD]

Why not have the infinite scroll, but always have a link that goes to Page 2.  That way the bot can crawl to Page 2 and then get a traditional layout and find the additional content and a user could click the Page 2 link and get into that mode as well.

May also want to consider that the infinite pagination is on sections that you keep the bots out of using robots.txt and then leave the pagination option open to the bots.

We do this for site search and if there are any sort options of a basic paginated version of the pages.  Once the user does a search and/or tries to re sort a paginated layout, we push them to a /search/ url with parameters and then hide that with robots.

Another variation is to use a hash off the paginated page to let the variables be passed while keeping the base URL the same.

Rand has a really nice WB Friday on this - really neat trick - it is from 2009 but it is still relevant

http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

Cheers

[gfiorelli1]

Infinite scroll may be useful for users, because they don't need to click click and click.

From an SEO point of view, yes it may be a problem if you don't set it up correctly.

Adam Sherk wrote a magnificent post about how to correctly set from an SEO point of view the use of infinite scrolling:

http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/seo-tips-for-infinite-scrolling

From a page performance point of view, I also suggest you to use - sorry I cannot remember the correct naming right now - that function that "retard" the upload of the content until it is now visible by the user due to the scroll down itself.

That way you are not uploading all the content of the page at the same time but just when it is really needed by the user.