Does anyone have any tips for SEO in WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM?
-
Hi I'm working on performing SEO on a portal that's implemented on WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM.
Now WebSphere Portal comes with some limitations such as non-pretty urls among other things. Portal also generates non-normalized urls, so you have to turn on a process for detecting and normalizing urls for the Googlebot, etc.
Does anyone have any experience with SEO in this platform, and could offers me a few tips for this specific platform?
Thank you
-
Thanks for your input. It's just as I though apparently we should re-think our strategy into using the WCM servlet directly instead of through Portal. When WCM is used through Portal via the WCM portlet the content item is fetched through that WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter, but the parameter itself seems less relevant to Google.
I'll look into this. Thank you for all your help.
-
The NCAA site does seem to be pretty well put together. Like you said, their TITLE changes from page to page, which you need for decent SEO. Also, once you figure that out, you should also be changing your META description tag within the HEAD on each page on your site, so it describes that page you're on. In the meantime, I would recommend removing your meta description altogether from all of your pages if you can't set it on a page by page basis. That way, the search engines will try to pick out the most relevant text from your pages (and relating to the user's search query) instead of always using "Auto Insurance from Universal Insurance Group Trusted. Fast. Service." (also you're missing some punctuation here between Group and Trusted).
Working within this platform, one thing which the NCAA site is doing well,which I think you could try to do is to get that nasty session parameter out of your URLs. I think you only need that if you're tracking the user's session? The NCAA site doesn't include it until I click the member login link. Since the Googlebot won't be signing in, if you can manage to get rid the these parameters when people aren't signed in, that would improve the SEO of your URLs.
The more of these random directories you can get out of the URLs, the better. So it looks like the way it's configured right now, is the URL doesn't change, except for the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter at the end, which is setting the content of the page? The NCAA site is getting the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter to appear at the end of the URL, like it should be, rather than as a parameter. That is much more natural, and I would imagine Google rather see keywords in the URLs rather than in parameters in URLs.
-
Hi and thank you for your help. The site in question is the following: http://www.universalpr.com/
In this platform the URL holds session information such as the language, navigational state, among other things. Now this platform has a normalization process that detects the user-agent and looks for bots such as the Googlebot. Once portal detects a crawler bot it strips out most of the session information out of the URL. The end result is still not pretty, but it aims for consistency otherwise you could get a huge number of URLs that reference the same content.
When using WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM (the CMS) content is displayed as modules or sections of the page that are called portlets; such portlets don't have direct access to the HEAD. This makes using canonical URLs is a bit challenge. However we're working on finding a way to write to the HEAD for updating the TITLE and adding canonical elements to the pages.
The following are two other examples that use this platform:
- http://www.ncaa.org/ - This site uses WCM stand alone and it redirects to WebSphere Portal only whenever necessary (i.e. the login). The benefits of this approach is that they can use canonical elements and that the can update their titles depending on which content is being displayed.
- http://miamidade.gov/ - Miami Dade is a lot similar to my example; which is www.universalpr.com. In Miami Dade's case the use the Lotus WCM portlet. If you click around this site you'll see that their Title is always the same and that they don't use canonical elements in their page either.
It goes without saying that I could benefit from using the NCAA's approach, however this would require quite a bit of re-work.
These are some of the shortcomings that I can identify with my limited experience in SEO. If you need any more details at all please let me know.
Thank you,
-
Let me preface this by saying I don't have any experience with WebSphere Portal with Lotus WCM. If you could describe more about what the platform outputs, or know of a site using it, I could take a look.
Non-pretty URLs aren't great, but they're not the worst either. If you're stuck with 'em, you're stuck with 'em. According to the SEOMOZ 2011 rankings report, having keywords in the URLs are still pretty important (69.9/100).
One way to work around the non-canonicalization of the URLs is including rel=canonical tags to all of your pages. That way, when Google comes across a non-normalized URL, you'll have the canonical tag to tell it the right page to pass the Pagerank to. Provided you always know what the normalized URL is supposed to be for non-normalized pages, this makes it easy to always have the Pagerank going to the right page. Even if the normalized version rel=canonicals to itself, Matt Cutts gives that the aok (video here). If you have a procedure that's working to normalize URLs, that's best, since we never know what's going to happen next.
More sources about rel=canonical: Google Webmaster Tools help and Webmaster Central Blog.
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
-
Craft CMS SEO Resources
I'm just starting out in freelance SEO & I've taken on a client who is using Craft CMS (version 2.0ish) for their site. I am not even close to being competent enough to manually code via Twig, but I had the main developer install the SEOmatic plugin for me. My question from here is - are there any resources or tips I should be aware of starting out? I just started by updating meta title/descriptions via "New Template Meta(s)" but I'm a bit concerned i'm doing the "template path" thing right - I haven't seen any visible changes in browser, and the SERP preview I'm getting is giving me a broken link. But i'm doing a fresh Moz crawl right now to see if the changes took place or not. so 1. Am I on the right track? 2. How long does it typically take for changes to start to show? 3. Is there anything I should be aware of? any follow up questions just let me know, I'll be following this thread!
Technical SEO | | dig_ad_austin0 -
Do old website files in the public_html effect SEO?
My client has about a dozen old folders filled with old websites including index files, robots, htaccess files. They are all located in separate files with in public_html. Does this effect them negatively?
Technical SEO | | Renalynd0 -
Acquired domains for SEO
hi there, For one of our insurance websites we acquired a domain, this domain is going to be redirected to our domain. After some research we discovered the domain we've bought also includes other domains which 301 redirect to specific 'insurance products'. These domains are also included in the deal. But what is the best technical solution for redirecting these specific redirected product domains? They already redirect to the product pages of the domain we've bought, so after redirect this domain, the sub (product) redirected domains will also link to us. It would be like this: A) www.sub-carinsurancesite.nl (301) -> www.domain-we-bought.com/car-insurance -> www.ourdomain.com/car-insurance
Technical SEO | | remkoallertz
B) www.sub-carinsurancesite.nl (301) -> www.ourdomain.com/car-insurance & www.domain-we-bought.com/car-insurance -> www.ourdomain.com/car-insurance etc0 -
Relaunching website seo audit
Hi People, We are going to Relaunch the website(https://www.y-axis.com). Url remains the same; the website has good SEO (Ranking, Leads, Traffic...). Website skin (layout, content) is going to change.Hence, would like to know the precautions to secure SEO. Please provide us necessary SEO Checklist for the above request.
Technical SEO | | Anshul.S1 -
Wordpress pagination and SEO
Hello Mozzers, We have incorporated Wordpress blog in our website. The blog has a fair share of what we believe is a valuable content both for the users and SEO. We have reached the point where our content is getting pushed out to pages 2, 3 and etc. 99% of the older content is still relevant and useful. However it does get less traffic from the users because it is not on the front page. I am dealing with it by showing "related posts" and get some traffic through that. I feel that the content that got pushed from the front page of the blog gets less love from search engines as well.The my permalink structure is /%postname%/ only, however when Wordpress adds page/1/ the SEO ranking appears to drop. Is it because Wordpress adds page/1/ to the address? What is a good way to optimize is? I have 15 posts showing on the front page should I increase it?
Technical SEO | | SirMax0 -
SEO is DEAD – Long live ADWORDS
SEO is dead and the winner is ….. Google Adwords Do you agree??? Shares in Google inc on October 24th were trading well over $1,000 per share, joining an elite club of super-shares having risen 42% since the start of 2013. And the reason is in one word ….. “Adwords” If your email inbox is anything like mine, you will have noticed a change in your “junk” emails that get past your filters. The spammers have given up on targeting “penial-enlargement” products (because every spam filter in the world is blocking them) to so-called-legitimate-business activities like SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or “How to Get your company to #1 on Google” The truth is all those thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours “we”, “you” and your company spent on increasing your Google “organic” rankings over the last five years have been a total waste of money…… and Google are totally to blame … and are making a total gain Once-upon-a-time you could get #1 ranking on google by using clever and current SEO techniques such as link-building, elimination of duplicate content, keyword density etc etc … terms many of you in business will have heard so-called-SEO-experts spruiking too many times and persuading you to part with $$$$ in cash to fix. How many of those so-called-SEO-experts told you you could save thousands of dollars by adopting a simple a cost effective Google adwords campaign??? Not many, the SEO industry is self-promoting and full of smoke-and-mirror (snake-oil) salesman promises. In recent times Google have….. a) Increased the number of paid ads at the top of the page from 1 to 3
Technical SEO | | Webjobz
b) increased the number of lines their paid adverts take up
c) increased the % of the “above-the-fold” advertising space to paid adverts
d) reduced the distinguishment between paid and organic ads to such an extent that around 50% of us cannot determine what is a paid or organic ad anymore. Being #1 “organically” (un-paid) in Google will NOW only get you 9% of the clicks on that page. 42% of all clicks goes to the top three “paid” listings (Adwords) If you want to get traffic to your site so that people purchase your products, move your marketing budget AWAY from SEO and web design and invest in Google Adwords as soon as possible. It is very easy to setup and administer yourself [staff removed links to copy of blog post]0 -
Redesiging website and how to prevent a SEO disaster?
Hey guys, I'm in the process of re designing my company website. This website runs in Kentico CMS and now I'm moving to drupal CMS. The main reason for the move is that I need a more flexible design with responsiveness and integrate better social aspects. Currently I'm having to deal with a developer whom can't be bothered to update the site. I also find kentico extremely difficult to deal with. The site has good Google rankings and I was thinking about setting up some 301 redirects when the move is completed. Now the question is this site is been live for over 2 years and I have tons of blog posts sitting in here. How can I get these moved? When this is done will they lose their 'age' ? What if I re create the blog posts as it is and then setup 301 re-directs on this? I have G+ authorship and will they be affected by this? Last question is having a responsive site will affect my SEO rankings once moved? I heard the 301 is not considered as a 'safe' thing with Google so what are my options? If anyone can share a link(s) to site upgrades/moving to new design tutorials/best practices articles based on SEO ill be grateful. Thank you very much.
Technical SEO | | Suganthan0 -
Browser Pop Ups - Can it be SEO Friendly and how?
Hi The designer of the company I work for is re-designing Pop Up browsers as well as inline Pop up and Drop down menus. He needs SEO requirements - how can they be SEO friendly? Thanks a lot for your help! SL. Please see below the detail: Browser Pop Ups all include:
Technical SEO | | charsimona
• a browser title,
• a logo and title in the title bar,
• a close window button and
• a call to action (that closes pop-up when clicked). Usage:
Use when you'd like to offer additional information to the
user but, not take the user away from the main page. Inline Pop up and Drop down menus. The inline pop-up & drop down is used to display additional menu options, functionality
or content on the page without dedicating real estate in the page layout. It's a part of the page HTML to retain SEO value and thus does not trigger pop-up blockers. A title bar displays when content of the pop-up or drop down is not in context of
the trigger. When used as a drop down, it is attached to the the bottom of it's trigger and left-aligned (unless it would exceed beyond the browser chrome, then it's right-aligned). When used as a pop-up, it is centered vertically/horizontally in the users browser window.
The inline pop-up/drop down can be triggered differently per instance (e.g. onclick, onhover with delay). It can be closed by: clicking on link/location that triggered the pop-up/drop down (a.k.a. close icon) clicking anywhere outside the pop-up/drop down There are 5 widths to choose from, based on the needs of the content: 196px (3 columns) 266px (4 columns) 406px (6 columns) 546px (8 columns) 658px (10 columns)0