Does Google index dynamically generated content/headers, etc.?
-
To avoid dupe content, we are moving away from a model where we have 30,000 pages, each with a separate URL that looks like /prices/<product-name>/<city><state>, often with dupe content because the product overlaps from city to city, and it's hard to keep 30,000 pages unique, where sometimes the only distinction is the price & the city/state.</state></city></product-name>
We are moving to a model with around 300 unique pages, where some of the info that used to be in the url will move to the page itself (headers, etc.) to cut down on dupe content on those unique 300 pages.
My question is this. If we have 300 unique-content pages with unique URL's, and we then put some dynamic info (year, city, state) into the page itself, will Google index this dynamic content?
The question behind this one is, how do we continue to rank for searches for that product in the city-state being searched without having that info in the URL?
Any best practices we should know about?
-
Hi there,
Not sure I have enough information to weigh in on the first part of your question - Google will index whatever it sees on the page. If you deliver the content to Google, then they index it. The problem comes when you deliver different content to different users. Try a tool like SEO Browser to see how googlebot views your site.
To answer your second question, its often hard to rank near-duplicate pages for specific cities/states without running into massive duplicate content problems. Matt Cutts himself actually addressed this awhile back. He basically stated if you have multiple pages all targeting different locations, it's best to include a few lines of unique content on each page (I recommend the top) to make each unique.
“In addition to address and contact information, 2 or 3 sentences about what is unique to that location and they should be fine,” Source
But this technique would be very hard with only 300 product page. The alternative, stuffing these pages with city/state information for every combination possible, is not advised.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/on-page-optimization-to-rank-for-multiply-cities
So in the end, it's actually not hard to rank for city-state keywords without having it in the URL, but the information should be in the content or other places like the title tag or internal link structure - but to do this for 1000's of locations with only 300 pages without keyword stuffing is near impossible.
The best thing to do is figure out how to create unique content for every page you want to rank for, and take that route.
For example, I might create a "Seattle" page, create unique content for the top of the page, then list 50 or so products with the unique Seattle prices. (This is a rough strategy - you'd have to refine it greatly to work for your situation.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
I see. To get the city-state pages indexed then they must have their own URL. If you can only access it via posting a form (assumed for using the search feature), the a search engine can't see it.
To get round this, you could put a links underneath the search box to popular searches. This will get them indexed.
Does that answer the questions?
Thanks
Iain - Reload
-
Thanks for the reply. The city-state content wouldn't be driven by the URL, it would be driven by the city-state that the user searched for. ie if the person searched for <product><city><state>I would want our /product/ page to show up, and show them content in their local city state.</state></city></product>
-
Hi Editable Text,
In short if you show Google a crawlable link to the content with the dynamic header/content, and the content is driven by the unique URL, yes it will index it.
As with any SEO/life question, there are a few t&c's with this.
- The pages need to be unique enough not to be classed as duplicate content
- Make sure it's intelligently linked internally
- You have external links pointing deep into the site
- You have a decent site architecture
To answer you second question, you'll need unique pages for each location, unless your content would be so thin, you'd need to group them. The URL doesn't have to include the keyword, but it's damn helpful if it does.
Hope that helps
Iain - Reload Media
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
-
CTA first content next or Content first CTA next
We are a casino affiliations company, our website has a lot of the same casino offers. So is it beneficial to put the content over the casino offers, then do a CSS flex, reverse wrap, so the HTML has the page content first, but the visual of the page displays the casinos first and the content after? or just the usual i.e image the HTML as content first, and CSS makes offers come first?
On-Page Optimization | | JoelssonMedia0 -
What to do to index all my links of my website?
Ok, i have a new website, with only 14.000 page indexed by google, but the potential is big, 1-2 million pages. What i have to do, to force somehow google to index my website faster? This is my website: https://vmag.ro/
On-Page Optimization | | TeodorMarin0 -
SEO and dynamic content
I am working on a project right now and I am looking for some advice on the SEO implications. The site is an e-commerce site and on the category pages it is using an external call to retrieve the products after the page is loaded. How it works is all content on the site is loaded, then after that a js script appends an ID and loads all of the product information. I am unsure how Google will see this, anyone have any insights?
On-Page Optimization | | LesleyPaone0 -
Is the HTML content inside an image slideshow of a website crawled by Google?
I am building a website for a client and i am in a dilemma whether to go for an image slideshow with HTML content on the slides or go for a static full size image on the homepage. My concern is that HTML content on the slideshow may not get crawled by Google and hence may not be SEO friendly.
On-Page Optimization | | aravinn0 -
Help: my WordPress Blog generates too many onpage links and duplicate content
I have a WordPress Blog since November last year (so I'm pretty new to WordPress) and the effects on ranking for some keywords are really good. So I thought tag clouds are good. Crawl Diagnostics tell me now that I have too many onpage links for example my author page breaks the record: 256
On-Page Optimization | | inlinear
http://inlinear.com/blog/author/inlinear/ I think thats because there are links for each word in the tag cloud generated ... On this page (and many other pages) WordPress displays (teasers) the beginning of each post (read more ...) producing duplicate content and even new canonical tags.... The page titles are also too long because I installed "All in One SEO Pack" and now this plugin and wordpress itself mixes titles together ... But what can I do to avoid all this. Is there a PlugIn that can help... I think millions of blogs will have the same problems... I my blog yet has very few content. Thanks for your answers :))0 -
Content for ecommerce site
How important on site/page contents are for ecommerce site. Keeping in mind the page layout. Its not that important to have page copy/content at all for ecommerce sites If yes, does position of content is an important factor? if putting page copy/content in upper fold of a page then the most important thing which is product itself will have less exposure if putting near the footer of the page, does that seem like doing just for the sake of SEs and ranking. How important internal linking form that content would be compare to left panel links or links at the header of a website Thanks Rick
On-Page Optimization | | RickGa0 -
Website Content
Is it bad to have html pages on a blog? I converted a completely HTML site to wordpress, but havd hundreds of article pages that are still html.
On-Page Optimization | | azguy0 -
Google indexing Internal Search Results
Greeting, Currently I have noticed that Google is starting to index our internal search page results. Should I block those pages in our robot txt file or have you ever heard of any websites that actually gained traffic or rank by letting Google index those pages? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Tonyd230