Parallax websites - good for SEO?
-
A client of mine is redesigning their site using a vertical Parallax & upon doing some research I've stumbled across Drew Barrymore's site: http://flowerbeauty.com/ - which also uses Parallax.
What I like in particular is that the site changes URLs as you scroll down. If you go direct to one of those URLs you'll notice unique meta data (albeit poorly optimised). All pages are indexed fine in Google (https://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=f8873f78dfbb8c5e&q=site:flowerbeauty.com)
I'm just wondering if this is considered ok as the user experience is good and they're not doing anything manipulative, however, there's duplicate content and a potential case of cloaking at hand.
I think this approach may be ok for my client for a product features page or a global office locations page since I can break up the sections nicely and split a really long page featuring a lot of content into separate URLs. Whereas Flower Beauty have done it across the whole site... i.e. one page of HTML = the whole site.
What do you guys think?
-
Hi Woj,
Good luck on your project! I created a board with Seo Parallax Responsive Websites. Please add your project to the board if you get it too work! http://www.pinterest.com/ecumbre/seo-and-parallax-scrolling/
thanks
Carla
-
Hi Carla - Thanks for doing that! I agree, their site is not very SEO friendly. Their big mistake is running the whole site (essentially) from one page. Which mean that every page is duplicate or a duplicate subset of the main set.
We looked at only incorporating a handful of elements from the site (well really only the URL switching as you scroll down & ensuring we have unique content).
For example, we have a parallax /features page which has an overview then each feature as you scroll. If you go direct to /features you get the overview only. If you go direct to /features/feature-1 then you only get info about that feature.
-
Hi Woj,
I know you posted this awhile back but I decided to run flowerbeauty.com through moz's software. It is not SEO friendly. I have the reports if you want to see them. Feel free to PM me and I will send them to you.
Lots of duplicate content
Hope it is not too late
-
We're playing around with a few of the technologies that site uses & will run some experiments. Fun!
-
Evaluate what SEO assets the dynamic URL structure provides to support SEO and which it does not. Carla pointed out some excellent points. But I did notice that there is no rel canonical specified and that the head disappears off the view-source when you get off the home page. I wonder how authorship and publisher could be implemented (less SEO and more visitor engagement, but still something to consider.). If you find that most SEO elements are available in the structure and you can hold rank using those elements, then "perfect" or "complete" SEO structure may not be necessary. Each industry seems to have its own tolerance for how well you can rank when you don't have all SEO elements in place.
-
Hi Woj,
I took a look at the website and did some research. Google is treating each URL differently and the internal pages are ranking. It appears to be SEO friendly and an amazing solution to Parallax scrolling and SEO. However that being said I am not a programmer. I would need to sit down with a programmer to look at some of the code. If you have one on your team these are the questions I would ask him or her.
- How is the URL change activated? Is it done with Ajax? From what I can see, the main navigation is a list and the scrolling activates the jump to a new place in the list. Each list element is a new URL.
- Does the website have an XML sitemap? I do not see one and I would feed this to Google webmaster tools. The site does have a SEO friendly architecture (the titles and metas could be improved a bit) and Google is picking this up
I do think it is ok to dynamically change the URL as you scroll and find it to be a wonderful balance between SEO and Parallax scrolling.
Thanks Carla
-
Hi Carla - thanks for your response. I guess, my main question is related to the specific technique they used in the Flower Beauty site example. Is it ok to dynamically change the URL as you scroll? If you view the source of each URL you get unique meta data... it's a cool technique if it's ok with the SEs, which so far appears to be the case.
-
Hi Woj,
You have got to read my Youmoz post on how to do a SEO friendly parallax scrolling responsive website http://moz.com/ugc/website-design-wars-seo-agencies-vs-web-design-agencies-worldwide-trends
Our project went really well
Feel free to private message me if you need more insights.
-
While Parallax design can be a great experience for users, you will have to take into consideration its SEO consequences and page load speed. When implemented for an entire website, using a one page design will be problematic since you can only have one
tag. Flower Beauty's website solves this problem by loading multiple pages in one page, but at the cost of speed as vagish mentioned. You would also have to take into consideration that parallax design doesn't work well on mobile devices, and a separate mobile site will have to be created in that case.
I would recommend using Parallax design for specific pages only (e.g. product features page). It would load much faster if its just a one page design and you would definitely want to captivate your visitors in the product features page.
Here's a link that may be helpful to you when looking at SEO concerns: http://searchengineland.com/the-perils-of-parallax-design-for-seo-164919
Hope that helps!
-
One issue I found was the speed. Also I don't think I've actually seen any sites ranking highly while using a parallax style theme. I actually built a site with a parallax site for a client (but he didn't care about SEO).
It took 15 seconds to load her site: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/flowerbeauty.com/tVCtPPl3 with nearly 300 HTTP requests. If I remember correctly you can only have 8 HTTP requests running concurrently per domain. These requests can be reduced by better caching and css image sprites.
From an SEO point of view I can't really say, but maybe having a look at lots of similar websites would be useful.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Ranking drop after new website
Hi there, I have a new client who has just had a new website built (by someone else). It was quite a major change as it was 12 years old and has just been moved to Wordpress. However although they are by and large happy with the new site, they have lost a lot of their rankings in Google. The content and menu structure is apparently identical. I told them I didn't think this was unusual but I'm not sure how easy it will be to get them ranking again. Where are they likely to be starting from? Is it a case of starting from the beginning or will there be some residual ranking capability left over? Or can they expect a full recovery over time? I was going to start by looking to see if things like tagging and meta data has been filled in (I will add the site to my Moz account) but is there any way of comparing the old site with the new for SEO purposes? Thanks so much, Sarah.
Web Design | | Frog-Marketing0 -
Ability to Transition Completed Wordpress Website to New Coder/Developer
We have worked with the same Wordpress developer since 2012. They recently redesigned our Wordpress site. We purchased a real estate theme and they performed major modifications to it. The project took 8 months. There are many customized widgets and multiple plugins. We hired a new SEO. The SEO is very comfortable coding. The SEO performed certain modifications and the code broke. The original developer stepped in and and helped restore the code. The SEO stated that the site should not be so delicate; that too many plugins and widgets are used making it inherently unstable. The original developer is claiming that the SEO did not follow best practices (they did not use a dev server to test). For a non technical business owner this is very disturbing. We finally agreed that the new SEO would make changes on a dev server and the original developer will check these changes to ensure they do not break the code. My question is, shouldn't a Wordpress site be simple enough to hand over to a decent coder with little risk of breaking the code? Are there any standards regarding the hand over of a site? I am comfortable with my developers, but what if they change professions or close their company? How would I transition the site? There must be standards and protocols that allow a third party, such as an SEO to change code without causing havoc. Any one have some insight?
Web Design | | Kingalan11 -
What is the best way to employ log-in to benefit in SEO?
Hi all, All SaaS companies have this log-in page as their top visited page in their websites and some times it helps and also hurts them. I've gone through some big SaaS companies websites and they handle the log-in page differently like on sub domain, on website page, some will directly link to their instance login without a page, etc...I wonder what is the best practice to host the log-in to make sure the more visits to log-in page don't hurt us but give us some boost. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Could a redirecting a homepage mess with seo? if so is there any documentation you could point me too? Thanks!
I have a global page for our site but the global site has the exact same content as the main navigation personal page. If I redirect /index to /personal how much seo damage are we doing?
Web Design | | Miguelquirarte0 -
Mergers & Acquisitions - Website Transition Good practice
Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone has come across good practice for maintaining websites after a merger or acquisition where there needs to be an association between two websites of the two companies involved. For an acquisition, I'm considering moving the acquired company to a sub domain of the parent company e.g. aquiredcompany.parentcompany.com. On both websites there wmay be a prominant popup so visitors can switch between the websites if they have visited the incorrect one. One worry I have is the acquired company has some good rankings, which I want to keep. I will of course manage the process through 301 redirects. But I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this approach or can suggest any better solutions. Thanks in advance, Stuart
Web Design | | Stuart260 -
Best techniques for trying to rank a single page website?
I am new to SEO and am currently trying to market a single page website. Its proving to be hard. I have managed to get the site to page one for a few keywords and it is improving (upto page 2 for some desired keywords) but it seems to have stuck there for a few weeks now - with no movement. I am able to develop it if required. However I thought that I would just ask if there was anything that could give it a nudge without this? I have done on-site optimisation. As far as I'm aware that's about as good as it can be. So any advice?
Web Design | | Chstphrjohn0 -
SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?
I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking. Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images. It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A. My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A. Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google. My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked. Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?
Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices1 -
Wordpress or custom built website?
Hello fellow mozzers, Hope you are all well. I am looking to get a website done and I am struggling to decide whether to get a custom build website site done or a website built on the WordPress platform. Would you be able to share your experiences and advice/suggestions on what you would use, and why? (pros and cons, etc.) Thanks in advance. Kind Regards
Web Design | | JonathanRolande0