Parallax Scrolling when used with “hash bang” technique is good for SEO or not?

[chakraseo]

Hello friends,

One of my client’s website http://chakracentral.com/ is using Parallax scrolling with most of the URLs containing hash “#” tag. Please see few sample URLs below:

http://chakracentral.com/#panelBlock4 (service page)
http://chakracentral.com/#panelBlock3 (about-us page)

I am planning to use “hash bang” technique on this website so that Google can read all the internal pages (containing hash “#” tag) with the current site architecture as the client is not comfortable in changing it.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started#2-set-up-your-server-to-handle-requests-for-urls-that-contain-_escaped_fragment_

But the problem that I am facing is that, lots of industry experts do not consider parallax websites (even with hash bang technique) good for SEO especially for mobile devices. See some references below:

http://searchengineland.com/the-perils-of-parallax-design-for-seo-164919
https://moz.com/blog/parallax-scrolling-websites-and-seo-a-collection-of-solutions-and-examples

So please find my queries below for which I need help:

1. Will it be good to use the “hash bang” technique on this website and perform SEO to improve the rankings on desktop as well as mobile devices?
2. Is using “hash bang” technique for a parallax scrolling website good for only desktop and not recommended for mobile devices and that we should have a separate mobile version (without parallax scrolling) of the website for mobile SEO?
3. Parallax scrolling technique (even with "hash bang") is not at all good for SEO for both desktop as well as mobile devices and should be avoided if we want to have a good SEO friendly website?
4. Any issue with Google Analytics tracking for the same website?

Regards,
Sarmad Javed

[Everett]

Hello Sarmad,

I don't recommend having a single-page website on the front-end. You can handle the loading of content however you like: Javascript, lazy loading, dynamic serving.. as long as each section/page has a different URL. A hashtag is not a new URL, but rather a named anchor link to somewhere else on the same page. Thus, using this technique you would only have a single page indexed in Google, not a lot of room to target different topics.

Lots of sites use the parallax design style, but have multiple pages. Parallax and single-page are not necessarily synonymous. The most common use on a multi-page site would be to tell a story on a landing page or the home page.

More concerning to me right now is that it looks like they're putting their clients' sites on their own subdomains, which are fully indexable by Google: https://goo.gl/z9dSDl .