Lazy Loading of products on an E-Commerce Website - Options Needed

[JBGlobalSEO]

Hi Moz Fans.

We are in the process of re-designing our product pages and we need to improve the page load speed.

Our developers have suggested that we load the associated products on the page using Lazy Loading, While I understand this will certainly have a positive impact on the page load speed I am concerned on the SEO impact.

We can have upwards of 50 associated products on a page so need a solution.

So far I have found the following solution online which uses Lazy Loading and Escaped Fragments - The concern here is from serving an alternate version to search engines.

The solution was developed by Google not only for lazy loading, but for indexing AJAX contents in general.
Here's the official page: Making AJAX Applications Crawlable.

The documentation is simple and clear, but in a few words the solution is to use slightly modified URL fragments.
A fragment is the last part of the URL, prefixed by #. Fragments are not propagated to the server, they are used only on the client side to tell the browser to show something, usually to move to a in-page bookmark.
If instead of using # as the prefix, you use #!, this instructs Google to ask the server for a special version of your page using an ugly URL. When the server receives this ugly request, it's your responsibility to send back a static version of the page that renders an HTML snapshot (the not indexed image in our case).

It seems complicated but it is not, let's use our gallery as an example.

1. Every gallery thumbnail has to have an hyperlink like:  http://www.idea-r.it/...#!blogimage=<image-number></image-number>
2. When the crawler will find this markup will change it to
   http://www.idea-r.it/...?_escaped_fragment_=blogimage=<image-number></image-number>

Let's take a look at what you have to answer on the server side to provide a valid HTML snapshot.
My implementation uses ASP.NET, but any server technology will be good.

var fragment = Request.QueryString[``"_escaped_fragment_"``];``if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(fragment))``{``var escapedParams = fragment.Split(``new``[] { ``'=' });``if (escapedParams.Length == 2)``{``var imageToDisplay = escapedParams[1];``// Render the page with the gallery showing ``// the requested image (statically!)``...``}``}

What's rendered is an HTML snapshot, that is a static version of the gallery already positioned on the requested image (server side).
To make it perfect we have to give the user a chance to bookmark the current gallery image.
90% comes for free, we have only to parse the fragment on the client side and show the requested image

if (window.location.hash)``{``// NOTE: remove initial #``var fragmentParams = window.location.hash.substring(1).split(``'='``);``var imageToDisplay = fragmentParams[1]``// Render the page with the gallery showing the requested image (dynamically!)``...``}

The other option would be to look at a recommendation engine to show a small selection of related products instead. This would cut the total number of related products down. The concern with this one is we are removing a massive chunk of content from he existing pages, Some is not the most relevant but its content.

Any advice and discussion welcome

[Tom-Anthony]

Hi,

I am not sure I follow your concerns around serving an alternative version of the page to search engines - is that concern based on concerns it will be frowned upon or technical concerns?

Using the escaped_fragment methodology would work for your purposes, and would be the best approach. If you have technical concerns around creating the HTML snapshots you could look at a service such as https://prerender.io/ which helps manage this process.

If that doesn't answer your question, please give more information so we can understand more specifically where you concerns are.

[JBGlobalSEO]

Hi Tom, Thank you for the response,

The concern about serving an alt version is that it would be frowned up from a SEO perspective and may lead to a form of penalty.

I agree that escaped_fragment would be the best approach and just wanted to satisfy my own concerns before I get them working on this.

Thank you and see you at Search Love

[Tom-Anthony]

Ok, cool. To reiterate - with escaped_fragment you are just serving the same content in a tweaked format and Google recommend it rather than frown upon it. Good to be sure though.

See you at SearchLove!