High charts, anyone used them? SEO impact/things to take into consideration
-
Hi there Moz Community,
Our org is looking into implementing Highcharts, interactive charts on our website instead of having regular static chart images. I found this post recently about how Moz implemented them a while back, a couple years ago.
https://moz.com/community/q/question-for-moz-developers-highcharts
Moz made a pretty good case for them over alternatives. They would certainly keep people on the page longer, which is good, but is there anything else that I should take into account or think of before going ahead with this from an SEO perspective? Does anyone else have experience with them on their websites?
Thanks
-
Looking at what's cached and appearing in search snippets, it seems like Google is crawling at least some of the text in my HighCharts on MozCast.com. Those charts aren't text heavy, so it's hard to tell how they weight it or if that text is eligible for ranking, but I strong suspect that Google is at least aware of HighCharts and can parse some of the data.
-
Hi There Jon and Dr. Pete,
Thanks for the answers. Much appreciated.
The only issue I was envisioning was Google's indexing of the highcharts. I imagined that since they are JS based, Google wouldn't be able to read and index them the way they are able to now with our regular image charts, but we are prepared to sacrifice that for a better UX with the interactive high charts. Luckily, as you touched on Pete, we have some accompanying text with each chart, so they won't be just pages with charts and little other content.
It is good that load times are ok, I hadn't actually thought about that. Our site speed is fairly fast, so most likely introducing HighCharts won't be a big issue even if they were to slow things down a bit.
Thanks for answers!
-
Yeah, the main MozCast graphs use them, and those are public. Google seems to index the pages fine and even is parsing a lot of the text content on the graph itself, best I can tell. I haven't seen any SEO issues at this point.
I think I'd be wary of putting any really critical content (to search) entirely in a HighChart. You might want to break it out. If a page is nothing but a chart, it's kind of like a page that's nothing but a video embed. It still has value, potentially, but if you had a lot of them it could start to look thin and bots might not see all of that rich content.
That said, the HighChart is a pretty heavy element of the MozCast home-page, and it seems to rank fine. I'd really just start to worry if you had 100s of pages that were each a different chart but had very little supporting content.
The other issues are technical. Load-times are good with HighCharts, but mobile rendering can vary a bit. It's decent, but there are variations. If you have a big mobile audience, I'd definitely make sure things look the way you think and are accessible. If you had a very low tech-savvy audience that had JS turned off, obviously that's a consideration, too. I think that's rarely a fear these days, though.
-
Hello! We use highcharts extensively in most of our apps and are pretty happy. Our UI devs have built some very slick looking visualizations using it. My personal favorite is attached.
Since all of our in-app charts are only available to logged-in users we don't have to consider SEO implications. However Mozcast does (http://mozcast.com/), so Dr. Pete might have some insight. I will ask him to respond here!
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
-
Onsite SEO vs Offsite SEO
Hey I know the importance of both onsite & offsite, primarily with regard to outreach/content/social. One thing I am trying to determine at the moment, is how much do I invest in offsite. My current focus is to improve our onpage content on product pages, which is taking some time as we have a small team. But I also know our backlinks need to improve. I'm just struggling on where to spend my time. Finish the onsite stuff by section first, or try to do a bit of both onsite/offsite at the same time?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Bingpreview/1.0b Useragent Using Adding Trailing Slash to all URLs
The Bingpreview crawler, which I think exists in order to take snapshots of mobile friendly pages, crawled my pages last night for the first time. However, it is adding a trailing slash to the end of each of my dynamic pages. The result is my program is giving the wrong page--my program is not expecting a trailing slash at the end of the urls. It was 160 pages, but I have thousands of pages it could do this to. I could try doing a mod rewrite but that seems like it should be unnecessary. ALL the other crawlers are crawling the proper urls. None of my hyperlinks have the slash on the end. I have written to Bing to tell them of the problem. Is anyone else having this issue? Any other suggestions for what to do? The user agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 BingPreview/1.0b
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
If I hired you/your company to do my SEO ...
If i hired you or your company to do SEO for my site (http://goo.gl/XUH3f) what would be the first steps you'd take? I'm pretty sure i've covered all of the basics myself, I'm just left trying to figure out what i should do next... rankings have been going up and down for the last few weeks, but even when they're up, they're not high enough 🙂 (and then they go back down anyway) ... I know some of you are going to say build links, please at least give me an example of one or two sites you'd try to get to link to mine... I'm open to any advice or feedback as I'm just a website owner who's been doing their own SEO & learning on the fly... Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prime850 -
Mobile SEO? Do we need it or not?
Hi Guys, I am about to start to redesigning a new mobile website and am curious if mobile SEO is actually having an affect or not. The site I am doing the redesign for, already has a very well optimized desktop site and has an existing mobile website with no optimization. The mobile website is ranking well in Mobile search so I am curious why I I would need to optimize the new mobile website properly, especially when the mobile website has a canonical tag for its desktop counter part? Love to get everyone's thoughts on this & where they see mobile SEO going in the next 12 months.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seekjobs0 -
Best procedure for distributing identical content about your company/site for affiliates to use?
When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice? Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Mobile SEO vs. normal SEO?
Hi everyone, I wanted to ask you abour your opinon on mobile SEO. Do we already have two different Indices, one for mobile, one for desktop? Except a few mobile listings I don't see a difference yet. If yes, do I need to do special mobile SEO for my site or is it enough to have e.g. a responsive webdesign which detects the device and shows a different page? Are there any other extra Mobile SEO measures that should be considered? I know of the Mobile Sitemap and directories but is there anything else? Best regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CrazySEO0 -
Has Anyone Used Boostability?
Looking into Boostabilty as an option for doing SEO for our clients, will still keep SEOmoz and will still be doing SEO for our own company. Has anyone used it or heard things about it? I am very skeptical when it comes to outsourcing SEO and when it comes to any kind of automated SEO but thought I'd ask if anyone had thoughts on it. Thanks, Holly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hwade0 -
How to best migrate / rebrand our organisation without losing the SEO on our current website?
I searched the current questions and found similar questions but nothing as specific as what I wanted, so... We are a graphic design school in Melbourne Australia. We have a website - www.graphicschool.com.au - that ranks fairly well in Google for our particular search terms. We have rebranded the organisation and want to change the website domain name to the new branding - www.grenadi.vic.edu.au - but obviously do not want to lose our hard earned SEO and rankings. We only have two strategies so far, and are not sure what the pros and cons to either strategy are, or whether there is a better way. The two ideas we have are: Option 1) Just swap the domain name. We were thinking about swapping the domain name and setting up 301 redirects to tell Google that the old page that ranked well is now this page 'x' on the new site. I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links. Option 2) Build a second website. This idea is that we would build a second website with our new domain name and branding and build up that site until it ranks as highly as the first site and then start to remove the first site. We're planning on completely redeveloping the current website anyway and changing and adding lots more content as well so this option is not out of the question. Any help, thoughts, suggestions or further options would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to discuss. Can I also please suggest that a new category is added under 'The SEO Process' - something like 'rebranding / migration' Cheers, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0