SEO best practices for embedding content in a map
-
My company is working on creating destination guides for families exploring where to go on their next vacation. We've been creating and promoting content on our blog for quite some time in preparation for the map-based discovery. The UX people in my company are pushing for design/functionality similar to:
http://sf.eater.com/maps/the-38-essential-san-francisco-restaurants-january-2015From a user perspective, we all love this, but I'm the SEO guy and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to guide my team regarding getting readers to the actual blog article from the left content area. The way they want to do it is to have the content displayed overtop the map when someone clicks on a pin. Great, but there's no way for me to optimize the map for every article. After all, if we have an article about best places to snorkel on Maui, I want Google to direct people to the blog article specific to that search term because that page is the authority on that subject. Additionally, the map page itself will have no original content because it will be pulling all the blog content from other URLS, which will get no visitors if people read on the map.
We also want people, when they find an article they like, to be able to copy a URL to share. If the article is housed on the map page, the URL will be ugly and long (not SEO friendly) based on parameters from the filters the visitor used to drill down to that article. So I don't think I can simply optimize the map filtered-URL. Can I?
The others on my team do not want visitors to ping pong back and forth between map and article and would prefer people stay on the discovery map. We did have a thought that we'd give people an option to click a link to read the article off the map but I doubt people will do it which means that page will never been visited, thus crushing it's page rank.
so questions: How can i pass link juice/SEO love from the map page to the actual blog article while keeping the user on the map? Does google pass that juice if you use Iframes? What about doing ajax calls? Anyone have experience doing this? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Should I trust that if I create good content, good UX and allow people to explore how they prefer, Google will give me the love?
Help me Rand Fishkin, you're my only hope!
-
Not a problem - would love to see the finished version once you complete it.
-
Thank you so much for this response. It is exactly what I was looking for. I would have searched the term PushState if I knew it existed. Thank you again. I friggin' love the Moz community!
-
Hey Eric,
You've got a deep one here with a few different things going on. Let me start with some observations and then walk you through the direction I would take if this were my project:
- The content on that example you gave is all HTML that's crawlable. So that page is getting indexed properly.
- If you were to reduce the amount of content in the left section, and swap it with a button leading to the blog post, Google shouldn't have any problem indexing those links to the pages which have more content. In that sense, your map page would be no different than a blog archive page, with titles and teasers leading to a complete post.
- Let's pretend for a second that we want to go with that solution, but we don't want users to have to leave the page to read the full content when they click the button. Then we'd want to display the content somehow in a way where we know it won't get indexed. We should be able to override that <a>link and load it into a popup instead of actually loading the page. If it gets displayed in a popup modal, that would be a nice experience without leaving the page. An iframe should ensure it's not indexed as content on the page, though you'd have to play with how it's sized and positioned. You could also load the content in with Javascript, though Google is more likely to index that properly than they used to do, and I can't recall which particular methods are non-indexable.</a>
<a>* Your next point was regarding users sharing the proper URL. You can hardcode the share buttons to the URL that is appropriate for them to share. domain.com/map#snorkelmaui would be a good URL to enforce the map to flow down to the Snorkel Maui business listing, and domain.com/map/businesses/snorkel-maui/ would be more like the URL of the individual article that is separate from the map but which can be loaded in a modal. This page would probably have some kind of "back to the master map" button or functionality to lead users back to that full map page experience.* Your other point was regarding users not visiting the correct page and therefore it would rank poorly. This isn't a big deal. If it's getting indexed properly and has internal links flowing from the popular and (let's hope) well-linked map page, then it should rank just as well as any other URL on the site with internal links.</a>
<a></a>
<a>Option B: If you want to get really advanced and avoid the separate page experience, you could use some kind of AJAX pushState() scenario to change the URL while they're looking at the modal, and fix it when they exit to modal. Downside here is that if they refreshed the page they wouldn't see the map experience, they'd see the static page version. You could also take this pushstate approach and use it to create a single page experience that does have multiple URLs without leaving the page, but each individual page is rankable on its own. </a>These two blog posts should set you down the right path if you choose that option.
I think that covers your concerns and lays out 2 options for you, but let me know where you still have questions.
-
bueller? bueller? bueller?
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
-
How to solve JavaScript paginated content for SEO
In our blog listings page, we limit the number of blogs that can be seen on the page to 10. However, all of the blogs are loaded in the html of the page and page links are added to the bottom. Example page: https://tulanehealthcare.com/about/newsroom/ When a user clicks the next page, it simply filters the content on the same page for the next group of postings and displays these to the user. Nothing in the html or URL change. This is all done via JavaScript. So the question is, does Google consider this hidden content because all listings are in the html but the listings on page are limited to only a handful of them? Or is Googlebot smart enough to know that the content is being filtered by JavaScript pagination? If this is indeed a problem we have 2 possible solutions: not building the HTML for the next pages until you click on the 'next' page. adding parameters to the URL to show the content has changed. Any other solutions that would be better for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Best way to "Prune" bad content from large sites?
I am in process of pruning my sites for low quality/thin content. The issue is that I have multiple sites with 40k + pages and need a more efficient way of finding the low quality content than looking at each page individually. Is there an ideal way to find the pages that are worth no indexing that will speed up the process but not potentially harm any valuable pages? Current plan of action is to pull data from analytics and if the url hasn't brought any traffic in the last 12 months then it is safe to assume it is a page that is not beneficial to the site. My concern is that some of these pages might have links pointing to them and I want to make sure we don't lose that link juice. But, assuming we just no index the pages we should still have the authority pass along...and in theory, the pages that haven't brought any traffic to the site in a year probably don't have much authority to begin with. Recommendations on best way to prune content on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages efficiently? Also, is there a benefit to no indexing the pages vs deleting them? What is the preferred method, and why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
My company wants to set up some blogs - what's best practice in getting started from scratch?
My company wants to set up two or three blogs (on previously unused domains) with the idea being to disseminate good content that gets picked up in SERPs and acts as a lead generator, shows us to be authorities in our market, creates brand (or individual employee who's doing the blogging) awareness etc... From scratch, what are all the boxes that should be ticked to make this work from the outset? What are the must haves?With all the ideals in place, how long could it realistically take to make this work? What are some pitfalls to look out for? Any advice in general will be appreciated. Thanks, M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
Volusion SEO
I have an SEO setting on our Volusion e-commerce store enabled, it is titled "Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp)" I am questioning whether or not this should be enabled for optimal SEO performance. Can anyone provide any advice on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PartyStore0 -
Best practice to avoid cannibalization of internal pages
Hi everyone, I need help from the best SEO guys regarding a common issue : the cannibalization of internal pages between each other. Here is the case : Let's say I run the website CasualGames.com. This website provides free games, as well as articles and general presentation about given categories of Casual Games. For instance, for the category "Sudoku Games", the structure will be : Home page of the game : http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/ Free sudoku game listings : (around 100 games listed) http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/free/ A particular sudoku game : http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/free/game-1/ A news regarding sudoku games : http://www.casualgames.com/sudoku/news/title The problem is that these pages seem to "cannibalize" each other. Explanation : In the SERPS, for the keyword "Casual Games", the home page doesn't appear well ranked and some specific sudoku games page (one of the 100 games) are better ranked although they are "sub-pages" of the category.. Same for the news pages : a few are better ranked than the category page.. I am kind of lost.. Any idea what would be the best practice in this situation? THANKS a LOT.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | laboiteac
Guillaume0 -
Website Siloing..best practice?
Hi all I am doing some research this week on the effects of siloing a Magento site. We have about 1,654 pages with approx 1,400 products. We want to silo the website in order to address the internal linking issues and to also focus the customer journey in a more organised way. I need to report all of the possible angles and effects that this will have on the site, prior to implementing it. Does anyone have info on best practice for siloing? I'd appreciate any help... Thanks Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Total_Displays0 -
Hiring an SEO company
I usually do SEO myself but now its time to move on to getting on with running the business. I have found a fantastic PPC company who ONLY focus on PPC and am looking for same but for SEO. Must be based in UK and have a great portfolio of mid/large tier companies with some real life stats to back them up. Pricing must be clear and transaparent. Results must be measurable. How would you find such a company? Ironically searching on Google doesn't seem to produce the right results 😞 Alastair
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alastairc0