Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Lazy Loading of Blog Posts and Crawl Depths
-
Hi Moz Fans,
We are looking at our blog and improving the content as much as we can for SEO purposes, but we have hit a bit of a blank in terms of lazy loading implications and issues with crawl depths.
We introduced lazy loading onto the blog home page to increase site speed initially and it works well with infinite scroll, but we were wondering whether this would cause any issues regarding SEO.
A lot of the resources online seem to be conflicting and some are very outdated, so some clarification on what is best in terms of lazy loading and crawl depths for blogs, would be fantastic!
I hope someone can help and give us some up to date insights - If you need anymore information, I'll reply ASAP
-
This is fantastic - Thank you!
-
Lazy load and infinite scroll are absolutely not the same thing, as far as search crawlers are concerned.
Lazy-loaded content, if it exists in the dom of the page will be indexed but it's importance will likely be reduced (any content that requires user interaction to see is reduced in ranking value).
But because infinite scroll is unmanageable for the crawler (it's not going to stay on one page and keep crawling for hours as every blog post rolls into view) Google's John Mueller has said the crawler will simply stop at the bottom of the initial page load.
This webinar/discussion on crawl and rendering from just last week included G's John Mueller and a Google engineer and will give you exactly the info you're looking for, right from the horse's mouth, Victoria.
To consider though - the blog's index page shouldn't be the primary source for the blog's content anyway - the individual permalinked post URLs are what should be crawled and ranking for the individual post content. And the xml sitemap should be the primary source for google's discovery of those URLs. Though obviously linking from authoritative pages will help the posts, but that's going to change every time the blog index page updates anyway. Also, did you know that you can submit the blog's RSS feed as a sitemap in addition to the xml sitemap? It's the fastest way I've found of getting new blog posts crawled/indexed.
Hope that helps!
Paul
-
I'm afraid I don't have an insight into how Google crawls with lazy loading.
Which works better for your user, pagination or lazy loading? I wouldn't worry about lazy loading and Google. If you're worried about getting pages indexed then I would make sure you've got a sitemap that works correctly.
-
Great, thank you
Do you have any insight into crawl depth too?
At what point would Google stop crawling the page with lazy loading? Is it best to use pagination as opposed to infinite scroll? -
With lazy loading, the code can actually still be seen in the source code. That's what Google uses, so you should be fine with using this as it's becoming a common practice now.
-
Yes, it's similar to the BBC page and loads when it is needed by the user so to speak.
It increased the site loading, but do you know at what point Google would stop indexing the content on our site?
How do we ensure that the posts are being crawled and is pagination the best way to go?
-
I'd have to say, not too familiar with the method you are using, but I take it the idea is elements of the page load as you scroll like BBC?
If it decreases the load time of the site that is good for both direct and indirect SEO, But the key thing is can Google see the contents of the page or not? - Use Google Search Console and fetch the page to see if it contains the content.
Also, Google will not hang around on your site, if it doesn't serve the content within a reasonable amount of time it will bounce off to the next page, or the next site to crawl. It's harsh, but it's a fact.
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
-
XML sitemap generator only crawling 20% of my site
Hi guys, I am trying to submit the most recent XML sitemap but the sitemap generator tools are only crawling about 20% of my site. The site carries around 150 pages and only 37 show up on tools like xml-sitemaps.com. My goal is to get all the important URLs we care about into the XML sitemap. How should I go about this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl0 -
Topical keywords for product pages and blogs
Hi all, I have a question regarding keywords. Of course we all know that keyword research should be focused on a certain topic and on user intent (and thus on answering specific questions) instead of trying to put keywords in a page to make it rank. However, duplicate content is of course still an issue. So here's my question: A client that sells floor heating systems that you can install yourself, has a product page for this topic and blog pages for questions regarding this topic. So following pages are on the website: Product page about the floor heating systems the client sells Blog article with tips how to install a floor heating system yourself Blog article about how to choose the right floor heating system These pages all answer different questions and are written about different topics. However, inevatibly all these pages also talk about different aspects of floor heating systems so this broad term comes up on all pages naturally. You could say that a solution is to merge pages and redirect the blogs to the product page, so the product page would answer all questions. But that is not what a customer is looking for. The goal of a product page is to trigger a conversion: let a customer contact the company or ask for a price offer. If the content on a product page is not comprehensive enough, the goal gets lost. Moreover, it doesn't make sense to talk about tips and tricks on a product page. So how do you tackle this problem without creating duplicate content? In search results, the blog pages rank for the specific questions, but the product page doesn't rank for the generic term 'floor heating'. The internal link structure is ok: the product page has obviously more incoming links than the blogs. All on page SEO factors are taken care of as well. Any ideas on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
How to handle a blog subdomain on the main sitemap and robots file?
Hi, I have some confusion about how our blog subdomain is handled in our sitemap. We have our main website, example.com, and our blog, blog.example.com. Should we list the blog subdomain URL in our main sitemap? In other words, is listing a subdomain allowed in the root sitemap? What does the final structure look like in terms of the sitemap and robots file? Specifically: **example.com/sitemap.xml ** would I include a link to our blog subdomain (blog.example.com)? example.com/robots.xml would I include a link to BOTH our main sitemap and blog sitemap? blog.example.com/sitemap.xml would I include a link to our main website URL (even though it's not a subdomain)? blog.example.com/robots.xml does a subdomain need its own robots file? I'm a technical SEO and understand the mechanics of much of on-page SEO.... but for some reason I never found an answer to this specific question and I am wondering how the pros do it. I appreciate your help with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo.owl0 -
Ranking Page - Category vs. Blog Post - What is best for CTR?
Hi, I am not sure wether I shall rank with a category page, or create a new post. Let me explain... If I google for 'Basic SEO' I see an article from Rand with Authorship markup. That's cool so I can go straight to this result because I know there might be some good insight. BUT: 'Basic SEO' is also an category at MOZ an it is not ranking. On the other hand, if I google for 'advanced SEO' then the MOZ category for 'advanced SEO' is ranking. But there is no authorship image, so users are much less likely to click on that result. Now, I want to rank for a very important keyword for me (content keyword, not transactional). Therefor, I have a category called 'yoga exercises'. But shall I rather create an post about them only to increase CTR due to Google Authorship? I read in Google guidelines that Authorship on homepage an category pages are not appreciated. Hope you have some insights that can help me out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal0 -
How reliable is the link depth info from Xenu?
Hi everyone! I searched existing Q & A and couldn't find an answer to this question. Here is the scenario: The site is: http://www.ccisolutions.com I am seeing instances of category pages being identified as 8 levels deep. For example, this one: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/B8I This URL redirects to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/headphones - which Xenu identifies as being only 1 level deep. Xenu does not seem to be recognizing that the first URL 301-redirects to the second. Is this normal for the way Xenu typically reports? If so, why is the first URL indicated to be so much further down in the structure? Is this an indication of site architecture problems? Or is it an indication of problems with how our 301-redirects are being handled? Both? Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Why is my Crawl Report Showing Thousands of Pages that Do Not Exist?
Hi, I just downloaded a Crawl Summary Report for a client's website. I am seeing THOUSANDS of duplicate page content errors. The overwhelming majority of them look something like this: ERROR: http://www.earlyinterventionsupport.com/resources/parentingtips/development/parentingtips/development/development/development/development/development/development/parentingtips/specialneeds/default.aspx This page doesn't exist and results in a 404 page. Why are these pages showing up? How do I get rid of them? Are they endangering the health of my site as a whole? Thank you, Jenna <colgroup><col width="1051"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JennaCMag
| |0 -
Article/ Blog Post submissions
Hello All, I'm looking to perform a 'Standard' guest blog post link building tactic, but i'm a little unsure as where to start. Does anybody have a list/ guide to websites that accept guest posts? Preferably ones that are useful for SEO purposes, I have been link building for about 3 months now, but to be honest, most of these links are NoFollow, which isn't too great! Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul_Tovey0 -
How to prevent Google from crawling our product filter?
Hi All, We have a crawler problem on one of our sites www.sneakerskoopjeonline.nl. On this site, visitors can specify criteria to filter available products. These filters are passed as http/get arguments. The number of possible filter urls is virtually limitless. In order to prevent duplicate content, or an insane amount of pages in the search indices, our software automatically adds noindex, nofollow and noarchive directives to these filter result pages. However, we’re unable to explain to crawlers (Google in particular) to ignore these urls. We’ve already changed the on page filter html to javascript, hoping this would cause the crawler to ignore it. However, it seems that Googlebot executes the javascript and crawls the generated urls anyway. What can we do to prevent Google from crawling all the filter options? Thanks in advance for the help. Kind regards, Gerwin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footsteps0