Bespoke Website With Lack of Front Page Content
-
Hey guys,
I wanted to ask you your opinion..
If you had a website - portfolio style for argument's sake and it was based on wordpress, obviously the front page won't be SEO friendly if you want to keep the minimalistic approach - there will be hardly any content to tell google what to rank your site for...
So my question is, can you use a plugin that Google can 'see' content - such as a long unique article - that the user can't see in order to help you rank? I.e. for Gbot, the plugin would load the content plugin as plain html, but 'hide' it from most people visiting the site...
What would you do in this scenario?
Your response would be much appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
I would not recommend putting anything on your site that Google can see but not your customers. From- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66353?hl=en
Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, including:
- Using white text on a white background
- Locating text behind an image
- Using CSS to position text off-screen
- Setting the font size to 0
- Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph
-
Hi there
You can certainly make use of some design elements to help your website appear attractive, but so it still contains useful information for both your user and the search bots.
You might have seen this already with landing pages that contain a video. You might want to make the video the main focus of the page with little other content visible to direct attention to the video and subsequent call to action (CTA). However, what people have done in the past, with good success, is include the transcript in expandable content. There will be a bit of text saying "Click here for the transcript" and, upon clicking that text, an element will fire, a box will expand down and the content of the video is then displayed. The search bot can read the content at all times, which will help the page to rank (provided it is on-topic), while the text is hidden by default for user experience reasons. There are lots of variations of this that you might have already seen.
There are two things that I would always consider: 1) Make sure you are hiding the content purely for design/UX reasons and not nefarious reasons (such as hiding text on an irrelevant page/website) and 2) Make sure that the content is justifiably there on the page. I've seen some people "mask" their landing pages in they will show the search bots a long, informative article, but a user who visits the webpage will be redirected via javascript redirect (which bots can't follow) or will overlay the page with an iframe (which bots can't see) to show the user one thing but the bots something completely different. In my opinion, this goes too far and is manipulative, which might see your page and/or site penalised. With this, you are deliberately misleading the bots and/or users with what you want them to see. I would think that a plugin that injects content would possibly be seen the same way.
I suppose there is a bit of a grey area but in my earlier example it allows the users and the bots to see, if they so choose, the exact same page and layout. The difference is that you are styling some content so that the design and user experience is one that is tailored, but you are not restricting either the bot or the user from seeing the full landing page should they so wish. That (again, in my opinion) is acceptable.
So with that in mind I would look at incorporating design elements that allow the content to be displayed if wanted, but can be folded away by default. Expandable content, tabbed content, accordion menus - there are a number of ways you can do this. Try not to be deliberately misleading, but definitely design your web page around what you want your user to see.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Internal link from blog content to commercial pages risks?
Hi guys, Has anyone seen cases where a site has been impacted negatively from internal linking from blog content to commercial based pages (e.g. category pages). Anchor text is natural and the links improve user experience (i.e it makes sense to add them, they're not forced). Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
AMP pages for a responsive Ecommerce website?
Howdy guys, I'm wondering if AMP is worthwhile intergrating into a responsive e-commerce site? I'm under the impression that the benefits of AMP would be focused around speed, however it may come at the cost of conversion rate if it was to be delivered for product pages, etc. I'm presuming that even if AMP was on every page across a responsive ecommerce site, Google would only display AMP pages in the carousel for news articles, such as on the integrated blog? Any advice would be awesome! Thanks guys 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JAR8970 -
Recommend Layout Page (home, categories or section, individual page)
Hello Could you please share with me your advice and recommendations on how to design a SEO layout (H1, Image, body text, etc). I need to give instructions to our website designer. I would like to see some examples. We are going to work with wordpress and visual composer. I really appreciate your help and time Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GHSCostaRica0 -
Review website - multiple pages of reviews of same item
Hi - I've been looking at review websites like tripadvisor - I looked at Tripadvisor's hotel reviews and the reviews may extend for several pages, yet they don't change title tags and so on, on each of the multiple pages? Surely it would be a good idea, from an SEO perspective, to change title tags (and perhaps other tags) for each of the multiple pages - even if the change was slight - e.g. "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 1" - "The White Swan Hotel - Reviews p 2" and so on? Am I missing something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Product Page on Eccomerce Site ranking very poorly - Unique Product description but duplicate content on other tabs.
Hi All, I have a query regarding my Product pages on my eCommerce site. I have unique Product descriptions but some of the other page content on the other tabs i.e Hire Terms , Delivery , About the Hire Company - Are duplicated across ALL my products. Is that okay or how should I deal with them ? See example url of one of my products below below - http://goo.gl/aSFPqP My products currently rank very badly... 200 + so Any advice would be greatly appreciated thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
What to do when you buy a Website without it's content which has a few thousand pages indexed?
I am currently considering buying a Website because I would like to use the domain name to build my project on. Currently that domain is in use and that site has a few thousand pages indexed and around 30 Root domains linking to it (mostly to the home page). The topic of the site is not related to what I am planing to use it for. If there is no other way, I can live with losing the link juice that the site is getting at the moment, however, I want to prevent Google from thinking that I am trying to use the power for another, non related topic and therefore run the risk of getting penalized. Are there any Google guidelines or best practices for such a case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeAir0 -
RSS "fresh" content with static page
Hi SEOmoz members, Currently I am researching my competitor and noticed something what i dont really understand. They have hundreds of static pages that dont change, the content is already the same for over 6 months. Every time a customer orders a product they use their rss feed to publish: "Customer A just bought product 4" When i search in Google for product 4 in the last 24 hours, its always their with a new publishing date but the same old content. Is this a good SEO tactic to implant in my own site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MennoO0 -
Duplicate content, website authority and affiliates
We've got a dilemma at the moment with the content we supply to an affiliate. We currently supply the affiliate with our product database which includes everything about a product including the price, title, description and images. The affiliate then lists the products on their website and provides a Commission Junction link back to our ecommerce store which tracks any purchases with the affiliate getting a commission based on any sales via a cookie. This has been very successful for us in terms of sales but we've noticed a significant dip over the past year in ranking whilst the affiliate has achieved a peak...all eyes are pointing towards the Panda update. Whenever I type one of our 'uniquely written' product descriptions into Google, the affiliate website appears higher than ours suggesting Google has ranked them the authority. My question is, without writing unique content for the affiliate and changing the commission junction link. What would be the best option to be recognised as the authority of the content which we wrote in the first place? It always appears on our website first but Google seems to position the affiliate higher than us in the SERPS after a few weeks. The commission junction link is written like this: http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1428744-10475505?sid=shopp&url=http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/vango-calisto-600xl-tent.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinhoman0