SEO tricks for a one page site with commented html content

[Ashkan1]

Hi, I am building a website that is very similar to madebysofa.com : means it is one page site with entire content loaded (however are commented in html) and by clicking on sections it modify the DOM to make specific section visible. It is very interesting from UX point of view but as far as I know, since this way most of my content is always commented and hidden from crawlers, I will loose points regarding SEO. Is there any workaround you can recommend or you think sites like madebysofa.com are doomed to loose SEO points by nature? Best regards,

[Aran_Smithson]

I love this type of site, its quick, different and provides a nice UX. Though in my experience, since Google is not going to process the Javascript and thus will be presented with a different view as to what the user will see. Which in the past has been a no no.

Just to note, disabling Javascript on madebysofa.com results in nothing being rendered on screen! thats one thing to avoid, better to display everything than nothing. In other words, display all sections first, then hide parts with javascript.

In summary, I personally wouldn't go for this type of design as I'm not 100% sure what google would make of it. I would start by checking the Fetch as Google Tool and seeing how the page looks. The lack of individual keyword optimised pages and the like put me off. But I like to err on the side of caution and play it safe.

[Maximise]

I would agree with Aran, show all your content first then hide it in the page load event. I wouldn't actually comment out the content, I would rather use "display:none" on the container div. Showing and hiding content sections with AJAX is very common these days so it shouldn't be a problem, provided it's done correctly.