Lazy Loading of Blog Posts and Crawl Depths

[Victoria_]

Hi Moz Fans,

We are looking at our blog and improving the content as much as we can for SEO purposes, but we have hit a bit of a blank in terms of lazy loading implications and issues with crawl depths.

We introduced lazy loading onto the blog home page to increase site speed initially and it works well with infinite scroll, but we were wondering whether this would cause any issues regarding SEO.

A lot of the resources online seem to be conflicting and some are very outdated, so some clarification on what is best in terms of lazy loading and crawl depths for blogs, would be fantastic!

I hope someone can help and give us some up to date insights - If you need anymore information, I'll reply ASAP

[seoman10]

I'd have to say, not too familiar with the method you are using, but I take it the idea is elements of the page load as you scroll like BBC?

If it decreases the load time of the site that is good for both direct and indirect SEO, But the key thing is can Google see the contents of the page or not? - Use Google Search Console and fetch the page to see if it contains the content.

Also, Google will not hang around on your site, if it doesn't serve the content within a reasonable amount of time it will  bounce off to the next page, or the next site to crawl.  It's harsh, but it's a fact.

[Victoria_]

Yes, it's similar to the BBC page and loads when it is needed by the user so to speak.

It increased the site loading, but do you know at what point Google would stop indexing the content on our site?

How do we ensure that the posts are being crawled and is pagination the best way to go?

[ThomasHarvey]

With lazy loading, the code can actually still be seen in the source code. That's what Google uses, so you should be fine with using this as it's becoming a common practice now.

[Victoria_]

Great, thank you

Do you have any insight into crawl depth too?
At what point would Google stop crawling the page with lazy loading? Is it best to use pagination as opposed to infinite scroll?

[ThomasHarvey]

I'm afraid I don't have an insight into how Google crawls with lazy loading.

Which works better for your user, pagination or lazy loading? I wouldn't worry about lazy loading and Google. If you're worried about getting pages indexed then I would make sure you've got a sitemap that works correctly.

[ThompsonPaul]

Lazy load and infinite scroll are absolutely not the same thing, as far as search crawlers are concerned.

Lazy-loaded content, if it exists in the dom of the page will be indexed but it's importance will likely be reduced (any content that requires user interaction to see is reduced in ranking value).

But because infinite scroll is unmanageable for the crawler (it's not going to stay on one page and keep crawling for hours as every blog post rolls into view) Google's John Mueller has said the crawler will simply stop at the bottom of the initial page load.

This webinar/discussion on crawl and rendering from just last week included G's John Mueller and a Google engineer and will give you exactly the info you're looking for, right from the horse's mouth, Victoria.

To consider though - the blog's index page shouldn't be the primary source for the blog's content anyway - the individual permalinked post URLs are what should be crawled and ranking for the individual post content. And the xml sitemap should be the primary source for google's discovery of those URLs. Though obviously linking from authoritative pages will help the posts, but that's going to change every time the blog index page updates anyway. Also, did you know that you can submit the blog's RSS feed as a sitemap in addition to the xml sitemap? It's the fastest way I've found of getting new blog posts crawled/indexed.

Hope that helps!

Paul

[Victoria_]

This is fantastic - Thank you!