Do we take a SEO hit for having multiple URLs on an infinite scroll page vs a site with many pages/URLs. If we do take a hit, quantify the hit we would suffer.

[jgodwin]

We are redesigning a preschool website which has over 100 pages. We are looking at 2 options and want to make sure we meet the best user experience and SEO.  Option 1 is to condense the site into perhaps 10 pages and window shade the content.  For instance, on the curriculum page there would be an overview and each age group program would open via window shade.  Option 2 is to have an overview and then each age program links to its own page.  Do we lose out on SEO if there are not unique URLS?  Or is there a way using metatags or other programming to have the same effect?

[Bryan_Loconto]

Hey gsalcher!

I wish I had personal experience to share with you on this topic but I’ve never worked on ranking any infinite scrolling page sites. I’ve only heard horror stories but again I don’t have any concrete advice to give. Check out these articles on the topic from SEL & Inbound.org

Hopefully you get some takeaways from them. Cheers!

http://searchengineland.com/single-page-websites-seo-182506

http://inbound.org/discussion/view/are-one-page-websites-seo-friendly

[AlanBleiweiss]

I have extensive experience auditing sites of all types, including with and without unique URLs.

I can tell you for a fact that if you fail to include a unique URL for each "unique" section, slice or "virtual" page, you will suffer regarding SEO and that will directly hurt your ability to have those "unique" variations of the site being found in search engines.

Best practices dictate that if you use "infinite scroll", "window shading", multiple tabs of content within a single URL, search engines need to also be presented with the alternate "individual URL" version of each in order for them to properly identify the complete unique focus of each.

This includes not only having a unique URL assigned to each "view", but also the related unique page Title, unique H1 headline tag and clickable navigation methods to reach those.