Search Marketing Expo – SMX West, March 11-13 in San Jose, CA. Register Now!
Join the most accomplished internet marketers in the world at SMX West, March 11-13 in San Jose, CA. Check out the agenda featuring three days of tactic-rich sessions, keynotes, invaluable networking opportunities, and more. All Access, Digital Marketing Summit, Workshop & free Expo+ passes…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
No Budget for SMX West? Attend Learn With Google, Sessions, Keynotes & More with a Free Expo+ Pass
Attend sessions on internet and search engine marketing from Google, Covario, Page One Power and Stone Temple Consulting. Meet leading solution providers. Participate in SMX Theater presentations and network with your peers. All for FREE – as long as you pre-register for an SMX West Expo+…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Bing Ads Expands Mobile Sitelinks Coverage In US, Will Roll Out To EU Markets
Bing Ads announced today that it will complete roll out of sitelink extensions on mobile devices in the US in coming weeks. In a post on the Bing Ads blog, Microsoft’s Eliot Li said they currently have enabled over 60 percent of the mobile traffic on the Yahoo Bing Network (YBN) to run…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Yelp Gets a Facelift, Puts Visual Content Front and Center
Yelp redesigned its look and feel to give more space to imagery and make accessing information about a local business or place simpler. With a new image carousel and more space for review content, Yelp has finally capitalized on the power of imagery.
Google Offers Advice On Faceted Navigation & Infinite Scroll Web Pages
Google has offered up two very technical blog posts on SEO topics covering infinite scroll and faceted navigation search engine friendly techniques. Infinite Scroll Web Pages Infinite scroll is what you see on a lot of newer style web sites such as Pin…
Will 11th Hour Objections Derail The Google-EU Antitrust Settlement?
When the European Commission recently announced yet another antitrust settlement with Google the matter appeared to be coming to an end. This was the third proposed settlement from Google but indications from EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia suggested that it was essentially final and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Infinite scroll search-friendly recommendations
Webmaster Level: Advanced
Your site’s news feed or pinboard might use infinite scroll—much to your users’ delight! When it comes to delighting Googlebot, however, that can be another story. With infinite scroll, crawlers cannot always emulate manual user behavior–like scrolling or clicking a button to load more items–so they don’t always access all individual items in the feed or gallery. If crawlers can’t access your content, it’s unlikely to surface in search results.
To make sure that search engines can crawl individual items linked from an infinite scroll page, make sure that you or your content management system produces a paginated series (component pages) to go along with your infinite scroll.
Infinite scroll page is made “search-friendly” when converted to a paginated series — each component page has a similar <title> with rel=next/prev values declared in the <head>.
You can see this type of behavior in action in the infinite scroll with pagination demo created by Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller. The demo illustrates some key search-engine friendly points:
- Coverage: All individual items are accessible. With traditional infinite scroll, individual items displayed after the initial page load aren’t discoverable to crawlers.
- No overlap: Each item is listed only once in the paginated series (i.e., no duplication of items).
Search-friendly recommendations for infinite scroll
- Before you start:
- Chunk your infinite-scroll page content into component pages that can be accessed when JavaScript is disabled.
- Determine how much content to include on each page.
- Be sure that if a searcher came directly to this page, they could easily find the exact item they wanted (e.g., without lots of scrolling before locating the desired content).
- Maintain reasonable page load time.
- Divide content so that there’s no overlap between component pages in the series (with the exception of buffering).
- Structure URLs for infinite scroll search engine processing.
- Each component page contains a full URL. We recommend full URLs in this situation to minimize potential for configuration error.
- Good:
example.com/category?name=fun-items&page=1 - Good:
example.com/fun-items?lastid=567 - Less optimal:
example.com/fun-items#1 - Test that each component page (the URL) works to take anyone directly to the content and is accessible/referenceable in a browser without the same cookie or user history.
- Good:
- Any key/value URL parameters should follow these recommendations:
- Be sure the URL shows conceptually the same content two weeks from now.
- Avoid relative-time based URL parameters:
example.com/category/page.php?name=fun-items&days-ago=3
- Avoid relative-time based URL parameters:
- Create parameters that can surface valuable content to searchers.
- Avoid non-searcher valuable parameters as the primary method to access content:
example.com/fun-places?radius=5&lat=40.71&long=-73.40
- Avoid non-searcher valuable parameters as the primary method to access content:
- Be sure the URL shows conceptually the same content two weeks from now.
- Each component page contains a full URL. We recommend full URLs in this situation to minimize potential for configuration error.
- Configure pagination with each component page containing rel=next and rel=prev values in the <head>. Pagination values in the <body> will be ignored for Google indexing purposes because they could be created with user-generated content (not intended by the webmaster).
- Implement replaceState/pushState on the infinite scroll page. (The decision to use one or both is up to you and your site’s user behavior). That said, we recommend including pushState (by itself, or in conjunction with replaceState) for the following:
- Any user action that resembles a click or actively turning a page.
- To provide users with the ability to serially backup through the most recently paginated content.
- Test!
- Check that page values adjust as the user scrolls up or down. John Mueller’s infinite-scroll-with-pagination site demonstrates the scrolling up/down behavior.
- Verify that pages that are out-of-bounds in the series return a 404 response (i.e.,
example.com/category?name=fun-items&page=999should return a 404 response if there are only 998 pages of content). - Investigate potential usability implications introduced by your infinite scroll implementation.
The example on the left is search-friendly, the right example isn’t — the right example would cause crawling and indexing of duplicative content.
Written, reviewed, or coded by John Mueller, Maile Ohye, and Joachim Kupke
Local SEO & Listing Management: A Blueprint for Multi-Location Brand Success
Local SEO and local listing management are completely different tactics, yet completely intertwined, and critical to ranking on Google. Follow these necessary steps for the best possible chance of ranking each of your locations for local queries.
Why “Big Data” Won’t Win You The Battle For Online Revenue
With so much attention currently being focused on big data, advertisers are beginning to lose sight of one crucial truth: big data is worthless if it’s not the right data. So what is the right data? We all know that the digital advertising landscape has dramatically matured over the past…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google Analytics Launching New Navigation Design
Google Analytics is rolling out a new design for their navigation and sidebar. The new design is less bright orange and more gray/white.
Google Analytics said on Google+:
Some of you may have noticed a shiny new nav and sidebar inside of Analytics…..
The Typical Day Of A Google Spam Fighter
Yesterday, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, posted a long video describing what the typical day is like for a Google spam fighter…
Google On Faceted Navigation: Block A Lot Of It
Google’s Developer Programs Tech Lead, Maile Ohye and Crawl Team, Mehmet Aktuna wrote a detailed blog post on best practices for faceted navigation…
Google February Update: Possibly A Google Panda Refresh?
There is a tremendous amount of chatter going on about Google updating over the past couple days or so at WebmasterWorld.
On February 6th we had the Page Layout algorithm update but that didn’t cause much of a fuss in the SEO forums. But something …
Google Webmaster Guidelines Adds Not To Block Google Ads With Robots.txt
A new update has been made to the Google webmaster guidelines document…
SES London Day 2 – SEM Power Tools Set: SEO & PPC #SESLon
More coverage of SES London 2014, where Russell O’Sullivan summarises a session with Richard Baxter and Jasmin Aherns about the right tools for SEO and PPC.
Post from Russell O’Sullivan on State of Digital
SES London Day 2 – SEM Power Tools Set: SEO & PPC #SESLon
5 Key Points to Consider When Choosing a Demand-Side Platform
With so many DSPs available it can be challenging to determine which platform will best serve your needs. What are some common inefficiencies to look out for and questions to ask before committing? Consider these five factors when choosing a DSP.
Domaining for Links
Whatever topic you need your future links for, you can acquire domains with a lot of authority links directed at it even before you need the link value. Once you need the link value, you already have a batch waiting to be used.
Reputation Management Dilemma – The Review From Hell
This post recently showed up in the forums: Link to your local Google+ page Business name (as it is in your account): Bakersfield Funeral Home Business location: 3121 19th Street, Bakersfield, CA 93301, USA Business telephone: 661-871-8080 Business category: Funeral Home Website: www.bakersfieldfuneral.com An ex employee is trying to hurt the business after being fired for […]
Live @ SMX West: Extreme Excel Excellence
SMX West. To manage complexity, search marketers turn to tools to manage keywords, understand traffic trends, calculate bids and ROI targets… there’s no end of crucial tasks that tools help with. Paradoxically, this also means there’s seemingly no end of tools to choose from,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
SES London Day 2 – Brilliant Blogging: Best Practices to Enhance Your Customer Reach #SESLon
More coverage from day 2 of SES London 2014, where Polly Prospelova covered a session with Lee Odden and our very own Bas van den Beld about blogging.
Post from Polly Pospelova on State of Digital
SES London Day 2 – Brilliant Blogging: Best Practices to Enhance Your Customer Reach #SESLon