Endless Scrolling and prev/next

[ioannis.anifantakis]

Hi,

We have a new website on https://www.neakriti.gr We have asked for endless scrolling between our articles, so when we get at the end of one article, the next loads.

Looking at the produced html code I saw the articles contain and to other articles.

When I asked the development team why this happens, I got a reply that its needed for the endless scroll of the articles.  But to my understanding "prev" and "next" is only used on pagination cases, and endless scroll between articles has nothing to do pagination.

Here is an example article
https://www.neakriti.gr/article/ellada-nea/1524252/fthinoporinos-o-kairos-tin-tetarti-stin-kriti-deite-analutika-tin-prognosi/

If you "view html code" on that article you will see this "next", "prev" declarations to other articles.

Can anyone please let me know if the declaration of "prev" and "next" articles should stay or if I should ask the development team to remove it?

Thanks

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

You are correct, it's not necessary at all to have prev/next for endless scroll. There are plenty of other methods to trigger the load on scroll. simply google "endless scrolling examples" and make your pick. One of them at the top - https://infinite-scroll.com/demo/full-page/ no prev/next at all.

[ioannis.anifantakis]

Hi,

thank you for your response.  I am looking at the example page you showed me.

1. So I should ask them to remove the "prev"/"next" then right?  It only causes confusion to the search engines that all the articles are a series of a single article somehow, right?

2. There is something additional I noticed during the endless scroll there, the "back button"...

On our website every time a new article is appended at the end, the URL changes too, but going back in history (pressing the back button) takes you back to the previous article of the endless scroll... so if you scrolled lets say 5 times with endless scrolling, you have to press 6 times the back button to get back to the home page...  But interestingly on what you sent me this doesn't happen with the navigation history.

I told the development team that I didn't want the "back button" to take me to the previous URLs of the endless scroll, but they replied to me that this was not possible...

How can we implement this?

[DmitriiK]

Prev/next should be used for telling Search Engines when there are similar looking/content pages. Considering the infinite scroll changes the page itself, prev/next are not necessary at all.

_"How can we implement this?" - _well, that's what your dev team is for, right Is it possible? - everything is possible. Again, the example I sent you was just the first example which came up in google for me, which seemed decent to me. I haven't looked too much into it, i didn't do any digging.

"Google is your friend, my friend"

[BlueprintMarketing]

I hate to say this to but endless scrolling is a terrible  when it comes to search. It is honestly one of the worst things you can do for your site unless you’re  very well recognized brand. For instance Instagram can get away with this type of stuff 99% of sites cannot pagination is great for what you want to do  please remember Google has to crawl?  With paginated pages  You get a a different page

https://parallelpath.com/blog/the-downfalls-of-infinite-scroll-websites-on-seo

https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/infinite-scrolling-seo-risks/

https://yoast.com/pagination-infinite-scrolling/

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html?m=1

Any time you implement JavaScript-enabled features, you run the risk of making it harder for search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, to crawl your site’s content.

If You  are not showing the content until somebody scrolls to it  I see that you are changing the URL which is excellent. I know that you’re using Ajax to do that from what I can see and unfortunately that is not going to be very good for seo .

I think it’s great that you have the bar at the top showing how far someone scroll I just think that you need to separate these into pages look at Google them selves you get Max 10 links at the bottom you get a next that’s Page

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi,

One extremely good reason why you may want to consider using pagination.

I just found a separate canonical pointing at a different page URL when I used your infinite scroll

**Your URL & your canonical  Do not match it would be okay if: **you are trying to send traffic to a different URL that is off-site. Now if it is on-site canonical's most of the time are better handled by 301's or 302 Plus this happened on 25 URLs in a row so it i is an attempt to direct traffic somewhere else.

SEE:

• ** Title**

• Έφτασε στην Κρήτη ο Νίκος Κοτζιάς [Length:33]

• Page Url
  https://www.neakriti.gr/article/kriti/irakleio/1524790/eftase-stin-kriti-o-nikos-kotzias/

• Canonical

• https://www.neakriti.gr/article/kriti/irakleio/1524813/mnimes-apo-ton-thanato-tou-kosta-katsouli/

page code:

You can't do this without changing URLs Please think about site structure and how if you check your Google analytics I guarantee you the deeper you get away from the homepage the less traffic you get. The golden rule is no more than three clicks from the homepage meaning if land on the homepage and I want to find an article about X, Y, and Z I am going to be able to find those articles through your navigation taking me (in an ideal world) no more than clicks from the homepage.

if you have a really powerful brand something that is a household name forget what I said you can do whatever you want. If you do not you, unfortunately, have one place where you have to find a huge amount of links and the only way you can do it is by scrolling so if I want to show my friend the article that you wrote and I did not share that article or bookmark it I cannot find it unless I scroll through a large amount of other and hopefully find it. Google is not going to endlessly crawl URLs that are not together internally and through a solid site structure. You need to remember that site structure is one of the most important things to building a website. If you create URL structure that hard for people and Google to crawl you will get extremely poor results.

If you really feel the need to do this make sure you add pagination to the bottom and you have a footer that people can actually access during the entire experience. If you look at this entire page you will notice there is pagination on the bottom just like the 1-2-3 style examples below. Yet you can do what appears to be very similar to infinite scrolling, however, there is an enormous difference in this you notice there are pages listed every X amount of items. And you can simply go to what you need to go. to using pagination on the bottom see pictures.

make sure to check Google's index though I would be careful nonetheless. https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.neakriti.gr/+inurl:page

https://www.google.gr/search?q=site:www.neakriti.gr/+inurl:page

and most importantly when I go to the CRM build and host your site I see that they the time to chapter different parts of each unique page showing me that they are not using infinite scrolling while yes the pages may be large they are using

• https://www.example.com/subfolder/subfolder/#name-of-chapter
• https://www.atcom.gr/technology/netvolution/#BENEFITS
• Your site
• https://www.neakriti.gr/article/kriti/1449099/sti-martyriki-bianno-parelasan-gia-to-oxi-video/

Use this to find some problems with AMP

1. https://varvy.com/rel/amphtml.html
2. https://validator.ampproject.org/

• It shows me this:

• Link to AMP detected on submitted URL

• You may have entered URL of a canonical page. This page links to the following AMP URL:

• https://www.neakriti.gr/article/kriti/irakleio/1524790/eftase-stin-kriti-o-nikos-kotzias/AMP/

Stick to what works I like that you have the bar on top showing me how far I have scrolled however I'm used to it telling me how far down the page I've gone not how far down I have gone on an

Page Url

https://www.neakriti.gr/article/kriti/irakleio/1524790/eftase-stin-kriti-o-nikos-kotzias/

Title

Έφτασε στην Κρήτη ο Νίκος Κοτζιάς [Length:33]

Meta Description

Στο εδώλιο του δευτεροβάθμιου δικαστηρίου θα καθίσουν 4 άτομα [Length:61]

Meta Keywords

Ηράκλειο, Κώστας Κατσούλης

Canonical

https://www.neakriti.gr/article/kriti/irakleio/1524813/mnimes-apo-ton-thanato-tou-kosta-katsouli/ Meta Robotsindex, followImagesmages on Page: 86
Images Without Alt Text: 26 

Headings (you have 5)

| |

• H1

• 1

|

• Μνήμες από την υπόθεση θανάτου του Κώστα Κατσούλη

• 2

|

• Θέρισος: Στο χειρουργείο ο άνδρας που έπεσε από ταράτσα και διαπέρασε πέργκολα

• 3

|

• Ν. Κοτζιάς: «Το στόμα μου δεν κλείνει, εγώ δεν εκβιάζω, ούτε εκβιάζομαι»

• 4

|

• «Συναυλία αγάπης» για το Παιδικό Χωριό SOS Κρήτης

• 5

|

• Έφτασε στην Κρήτη ο Νίκος Κοτζιάς

|

Hopr this helps,Tom

QGIwSIO.png eAaUl2H.png gIj51HL.png obiJ3i5.png

[ioannis.anifantakis]

Thank you for your reply.

I however am unable to see the problem you describe.  Even at the page code you pasted, I see that the canonical URL is the same:

Where the canonical URL of the page is the same as the page
https://www.neakriti.gr/article/kriti/irakleio/1524790/eftase-stin-kriti-o-nikos-kotzias/

When you scroll down, the URL changes and if you "view code" of the updated page that was appended you see the new canonical URL.

Can you please explain me your findings as I am unable to replicate it?