GoogleBot Mobile & Depagination

[nbyloff]

I am building a new site for a client and we're discussing their inventory section. What I would like to accomplish is have all their products load on scroll (or swipe on mobile). I have seen suggestions to load all content in the background at once, and show it as they swipe, lazy loading the product images. This will work fine for the user, but what about how GoogleBot mobile crawls the page?

Will it simulate swiping? Will it load every product at once, killing page load times b/c of all of the images it must load at once? What are considered SEO best practices when loading inventory using this technique.

I worry about this b/c it's possible for 2,000+ results to be returned, and I don't want GoogleBot to try and load all those results at once (with their product thumbnail images). And I know you will say to break those products up into categories, etc. But I want the "swipe for more" experience. 99.9% of our users will click a category or filter the results, but if someone wants to swipe through all 2,000 items on the main inventory landing page, they can. I would rather have this option than "Page 1 of 350".

I like option #4 in this question, but not sure how Google will handle it.

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/7268/iphone-mobile-web-pagination-vs-load-more-vs-scrolling?rq=1

I asked Matt Cutts to answer this, if you want to upvote this question.
https://www.google.com/moderator/#11/e=adbf4&u=CAIQwYCMnI6opfkj

[yeagerd]

What you ideally want to do is set up the mobile site as a standard site.  Then utilize javascript to call each page in an order defined by the users actions with dynamic loading.

This has two benefits:

1. SEO and SERP.  The pages will be indexed as they should.  If you have one huge page you are still limited to the 2 or 3 keywords as always.  When you see a good infinite scroll website it is not one page, it only looks this way due to JavaScript calling additional pages at triggers that have been set.

2. No JavaScript graceful fallback (or fallforward as it is actually the native state).  If you have one page, lazy loading with JavaScript and they do not support it then you have 2,000 pages worth of images loading at one time which is otherwise known as a bounce.

You will want to build out the site with no consideration to the infinite scrolling (except in design ie. tile-able backgrounds for a smooth non stop flow) then apply the script after you have a logical site structure using silo'ed categories.  Google bot, Google bot mobile and users who do not have JavaScript will all have a useable site and the SERPS will rank pages as they should.

Tip:  Keep any page wide bar or graphic styles in the header or the footer of the page.  You will normally only call the content or article portion of the page to the infinite scroll so you have a non-stop flow on the site.

Hope this helps

I know your not using WordPress but I am assuming you are using some sort of templated PHP script for a 2K product store.  This WP plugin is pretty easy to understand and what I first used to grab the concept.  Also, if wanting to go a more Pinterest route look into Masonry JavaScript.  http://www.infinite-scroll.com/