Parallax websites - good for SEO?
-
A client of mine is redesigning their site using a vertical Parallax & upon doing some research I've stumbled across Drew Barrymore's site: http://flowerbeauty.com/ - which also uses Parallax.
What I like in particular is that the site changes URLs as you scroll down. If you go direct to one of those URLs you'll notice unique meta data (albeit poorly optimised). All pages are indexed fine in Google (https://www.google.com/#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=f8873f78dfbb8c5e&q=site:flowerbeauty.com)
I'm just wondering if this is considered ok as the user experience is good and they're not doing anything manipulative, however, there's duplicate content and a potential case of cloaking at hand.
I think this approach may be ok for my client for a product features page or a global office locations page since I can break up the sections nicely and split a really long page featuring a lot of content into separate URLs. Whereas Flower Beauty have done it across the whole site... i.e. one page of HTML = the whole site.
What do you guys think?
-
Hi Woj,
Good luck on your project! I created a board with Seo Parallax Responsive Websites. Please add your project to the board if you get it too work! http://www.pinterest.com/ecumbre/seo-and-parallax-scrolling/
thanks
Carla
-
Hi Carla - Thanks for doing that! I agree, their site is not very SEO friendly. Their big mistake is running the whole site (essentially) from one page. Which mean that every page is duplicate or a duplicate subset of the main set.
We looked at only incorporating a handful of elements from the site (well really only the URL switching as you scroll down & ensuring we have unique content).
For example, we have a parallax /features page which has an overview then each feature as you scroll. If you go direct to /features you get the overview only. If you go direct to /features/feature-1 then you only get info about that feature.
-
Hi Woj,
I know you posted this awhile back but I decided to run flowerbeauty.com through moz's software. It is not SEO friendly. I have the reports if you want to see them. Feel free to PM me and I will send them to you.
Lots of duplicate content
Hope it is not too late
-
We're playing around with a few of the technologies that site uses & will run some experiments. Fun!
-
Evaluate what SEO assets the dynamic URL structure provides to support SEO and which it does not. Carla pointed out some excellent points. But I did notice that there is no rel canonical specified and that the head disappears off the view-source when you get off the home page. I wonder how authorship and publisher could be implemented (less SEO and more visitor engagement, but still something to consider.). If you find that most SEO elements are available in the structure and you can hold rank using those elements, then "perfect" or "complete" SEO structure may not be necessary. Each industry seems to have its own tolerance for how well you can rank when you don't have all SEO elements in place.
-
Hi Woj,
I took a look at the website and did some research. Google is treating each URL differently and the internal pages are ranking. It appears to be SEO friendly and an amazing solution to Parallax scrolling and SEO. However that being said I am not a programmer. I would need to sit down with a programmer to look at some of the code. If you have one on your team these are the questions I would ask him or her.
- How is the URL change activated? Is it done with Ajax? From what I can see, the main navigation is a list and the scrolling activates the jump to a new place in the list. Each list element is a new URL.
- Does the website have an XML sitemap? I do not see one and I would feed this to Google webmaster tools. The site does have a SEO friendly architecture (the titles and metas could be improved a bit) and Google is picking this up
I do think it is ok to dynamically change the URL as you scroll and find it to be a wonderful balance between SEO and Parallax scrolling.
Thanks Carla
-
Hi Carla - thanks for your response. I guess, my main question is related to the specific technique they used in the Flower Beauty site example. Is it ok to dynamically change the URL as you scroll? If you view the source of each URL you get unique meta data... it's a cool technique if it's ok with the SEs, which so far appears to be the case.
-
Hi Woj,
You have got to read my Youmoz post on how to do a SEO friendly parallax scrolling responsive website http://moz.com/ugc/website-design-wars-seo-agencies-vs-web-design-agencies-worldwide-trends
Our project went really well
Feel free to private message me if you need more insights.
-
While Parallax design can be a great experience for users, you will have to take into consideration its SEO consequences and page load speed. When implemented for an entire website, using a one page design will be problematic since you can only have one
tag. Flower Beauty's website solves this problem by loading multiple pages in one page, but at the cost of speed as vagish mentioned. You would also have to take into consideration that parallax design doesn't work well on mobile devices, and a separate mobile site will have to be created in that case.
I would recommend using Parallax design for specific pages only (e.g. product features page). It would load much faster if its just a one page design and you would definitely want to captivate your visitors in the product features page.
Here's a link that may be helpful to you when looking at SEO concerns: http://searchengineland.com/the-perils-of-parallax-design-for-seo-164919
Hope that helps!
-
One issue I found was the speed. Also I don't think I've actually seen any sites ranking highly while using a parallax style theme. I actually built a site with a parallax site for a client (but he didn't care about SEO).
It took 15 seconds to load her site: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/flowerbeauty.com/tVCtPPl3 with nearly 300 HTTP requests. If I remember correctly you can only have 8 HTTP requests running concurrently per domain. These requests can be reduced by better caching and css image sprites.
From an SEO point of view I can't really say, but maybe having a look at lots of similar websites would be useful.
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
-
I'm doing a crawl analysis for a website and finding all these duplicate URLs with "null" being added to them and have no clue what could be causing this.
Does anyone know what could be causing this? Our dev team thinks it's caused by mobile pages they created a while ago but it is adding 1000's of additional URLs to the crawl report and being indexed by Google. They don't see it as a priority but I believe these could be very harmful to our site. examples from URL string:
Web Design | | julianne.amann
uruguay-argentina-chilenullnull/days
rainforests-volcanoes-wildlifenullnull/reviews
of-eastern-europenullnullnullnull/hotels0 -
Does the blog widget with latest blog-posts at homepage helps in SEO?
Hi all, We are planning to add a widget at our website homepage which displays recent blog-posts with dates. Google favours new and latest content. So will these consistent new posts help in improving website ranking? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Website Server Issue?
I'm getting error messages that a website cannot be crawled and it might be due to the following issues: Couldn't access the webpage because the server either timed out or refused/closed the connection before our crawler could receive a response. How to fix: Please contact your web hosting technical support team and ask them to fix the issue Could Possibly Be:
Web Design | | PrimeMediaConsulting
1. DDoS protection system.
OR
2. Overloaded or misconfigured server They asked me to talk to my hosting company about this issue and he's at a loss (I don't think he knows everything he needs to know potentially). Have you seen these issues before? Where is the best spot to start troubleshooting this issue?0 -
Prismic.io CMS and SEO?
Looking for community feedback: Some of our In house developers want to use Prismic.io over Wordpress for it's alleged ease of organizing and "deploying" content. It's essentially a repository for content from which you make API calls to. It's a rather new platform. There a few posts in Quora around SEO but looking to see if anyone has had experience with platform. My concern is around page load times, excessive server requests, and content viewed as code. Any thoughts/ experiences would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | ArcherMalmo0 -
SEO and Modal Windows
Hi all, My website has a Login and Join Us option on every page in the site. Each Login and Join Us window pops up as a modal window. In other words, the user must interact with it before they are taken somewhere else (whether they close it or fill it in). It has come to my attention that this is being counted as duplicate content. Is there any way around this? It's calling duplicate content on practically the whole website. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Info12340 -
SEO tricks for a one page site with commented html content
Hi, I am building a website that is very similar to madebysofa.com : means it is one page site with entire content loaded (however are commented in html) and by clicking on sections it modify the DOM to make specific section visible. It is very interesting from UX point of view but as far as I know, since this way most of my content is always commented and hidden from crawlers, I will loose points regarding SEO. Is there any workaround you can recommend or you think sites like madebysofa.com are doomed to loose SEO points by nature? Best regards,
Web Design | | Ashkan10 -
What are the top 3 things you evaluate when contracted to SEO a website?
As a freelancer, what are the top 3 things you evaluate when contracted to SEO a website for a client?
Web Design | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Landing Page - is this one a good landing page?
Hello Everyone, I want to ask about this landing page: http://www.rpgdicas.com.br/builds/diablo-2/build-necromancer-summoner-diablo-2.html It's in portuguese-brazil. What should I improve? Any tipps will be apreciated keywords: Build Necromancer Summoner, build necromancer summoner diablo 2, so on... thanks, everyone.
Web Design | | augustos0