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We have an SEO team at my office, and one of their dictums is that having lots of <script> blocks inline with the HTML is apocalypticly bad. As a developer that makes no sense to me at all. Surely the Google search engineers, who are the smartest people on the planet, know how to skip over such blocks?
My gut instinct is that minimizing script blocks is a superstition that comes from the early ages of search engine optimizations, and that in today's world it means nothing. Does anyone have any insight on this?
per our SEO guru, script blocks (especially those that are in-line, or occur before actual content) are very, very bad, and make the google bots give up before processing your actual content. Seems like bull to me, but I'd like to see what others say.
It's been ages since I've played the reading google's tea leafs game, but there are a few reasons your SEO expert might be saying this
Three or four years back there was a bit of conventional wisdom floating around that the search engine algorithms would give more weight to search terms that happened sooner in the page. If all other things were equal on Pages A and B, if Page A mentions widgets earlier in the HTML file than Page B, Page A "wins". It's not that Google's engineers and PhD employees couldn't skip over the blocks, it's that they found a valuable metric in their presence. Taking that into account, it's easy to see how unless something "needs" (see #2 below) to be in the head of a document, an SEO obsessed person would want it out.
The SEO people who aren't offering a quick fix tend to be proponents of well-crafted, validating/conforming HTML/XHTML structure. Inline Javascript, particularly the kind web ignorant software engineers tend to favor makes these people (I'm one) seethe. The bias against script tags themselves could also stem from some of the work Yahoo and others have done in optimizing Ajax applications (don't make the browser parse Javascript until is has to). Not necessarily directly related to SEO, but a best practice a white hat SEO type will have picked up.
It's also possible you're misunderstanding each other. Content that's generated by Javascript is considered controversial in the SEO world. It's not that Google can't "see" this content, it's that people are unsure how its presence will rank the page, as a lot of black hat SEO games revolve around hiding and showing content with Javascript.
SEO is at best Kremlinology and at worse a field that the black hats won over a long time ago. My free unsolicited advice is to stay out of the SEO game, present your managers with estimates as so how long it will take to implement their SEO related changes, and leave it at that.
There's several reasons to avoid inline/internal Javascript:
HTML is for structure, not behavior or style. For the same reason you should not put CSS directly in HTML elements, you should not put JS.
If your client does not support JS you just pushed a lot of junk. Wasted bandwith.
External JS files are cached. That saves some bandwith.
You'll have a descentralized javascript. That leads to code repetition and all the known problemns that comes with it.
I don't know about the SEO aspect of this (because I never can tell the mambo jambo from the real deal). But as Douglas Crockford pointed out in one of his javascript webcasts the browser always stops for parsing the script, at each element. So, if possible, I'd rather deliver the whole document and enhance the page as late as possible with scripts anyway.
Something like
<head>
--stylesheets--
</head>
<body>
Lorem ipsum dolor
...
...
<script src="theFancyStuff.js"></script>
</body>
I've read in a few places that Google's spiders only index the first 100KB of a page. 20KB of JS at the top of your page would mean 20KB of content later on that Google wouldn't see, etc.
Mind you, I have no idea if this fact is still true, but when combine it with the rest of the superstition/rumors/outright quackery you find in the dark underbelly of SEO forums, it starts to make a strange sort of sense.
This is in addition to the fact that inline JS is a Bad Thing with respect to the separation of presentation, content, and behavior, as mentioned in other answers.
Your SEO guru is slightly off the mark, but I understand the concern. This has nothing to do with whether or not the practice is proper, or whether or not a certain number of script tags is looked upon poorly by Google, but everything to do with page weight. Google stops caching after (I think) 150KB. The more inline scripts your page contains, the greater the chance important content will not be indexed because those scripts added too much weight.
I've spent some time working on search engines (not Google), but have never really done much from an SEO perspective.
Anyway, here are some factors which Google could reasonably use to penalise the page which should be increased by including big blocks of javascript inline.
Overall page size.
Page download time (a mix of page size and download speed).
How early in the page the search terms occurred (might ignore script tags, but that's a lot more processing).
Script tags with lots of inline javascript might be interpreted to be bad on their own. If users frequently loaded a lot of pages form the site, they'd find it much faster if the script was in a single shared file.
I would agree with all of the other comments but would add that when a page has more than just
<p> around the content you are putting your faith in Google to interpret the mark-up correctly and that is always a risky thing to do. Content is king and if Google can't read the content perfectly then it's just another reason for google to not show you the love.
This is an old question, but still pretty relevant!
In my experience, script tags are bad if they cause your site to load slowly. Site speed actually does have an impact on your appearance in SERPs, but script tags in and of themselves aren't necessarily bad for SEO.
Lots of activities in SEO is not recommended by search engine. You can use <script> tag but not excessively. Even Google Analytics snippet code in <script> tag.
Related
I'm working on a shopping site. We display 40 images in our results. We're looking to reduce the onload time of our page, and since images block the onload event, I'm considering lazy loading them by initially setting img.src="" and then setting them after onload. Note that this is not ajax loading of html fragments. the image html along with the alt text is present. it's just the image src is deferred.
Does anyone have any idea as to whether this may harm SEO or lead to a google penalty box now that they are measuring sitespeed?
Images don't block anything, they are already lazy loaded. The onload event notifies you that all of the content has been downloaded, including images, but that is long after the document is ready.
It might hurt your rank because of the lost keywords and empty src attributes. You'll probably lose more than you gain - you're better off optimizing your page in other ways, including your images. Gzip + fewer requests + proper expires + a fast static server should go a long way. There is also a free CDN that might interest you.
I'm sure google doesn't mean for the whole web to remove their images from source code to gain a few points. And keep in mind that they consider anything under 3s to be good loading times, there's plenty of room to wiggle before resorting to voodoo techniques.
From a pure SEO perspective, you shouldn't be indexing search result pages. You should index your home page and your product detail pages, and have a spiderable method of getting to those pages (category pages, sitemap.xml, etc.)
Here's what Matt Cutts has to say on the topic, in a post from 2007:
In general, we’ve seen that users usually don’t want to see search results (or copies of websites via proxies) in their search results. Proxied copies of websites and search results that don’t add much value already fall under our quality guidelines (e.g. “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” and “Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches…”), so Google does take action to reduce the impact of those pages in our index.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/
This isn't to say that you're going to be penalised for indexing the search results, just that Google will place little value on them, so lazy-loading the images (or not) won't have much of an impact.
There are some different ways to approach this question.
Images don't block load. Javascript does; stylesheets do to an extent (it's complicated); images do not. However, they will consume http connections, of which the browser will only fire off 2 per domain at a time.
So, what you can do that should be worry-free and the "Right Thing" is to do a poor man's CDN and just drop them on www1, www2, www3, etc on your own site and servers. There are a number of ways to do that without much difficulty.
On the other hand: no, it shouldn't affect your SEO. I don't think Google even bothers to load images, actually.
We display 40 images in our results.
first question, is this page even a landing page? is it targeted for a specific keyword? internal search result pages are not automatically landing pages. if they are not a landingpage, then do whatever you want with them (and make sure they do not get indexed by google).
if they are a landingpages (a page targeted for a specific keyword) the performance of the site is indeed important, for the conversion rate of these pages and indirectly (and to a smaller extend also directly) also for google. so a kind of lazy load logic for pages with a lot of images is a good idea.
i would go for:
load the first two (product?) images in an SEO optimized way (as normal HTML, with a targeted alt text and a targeted filename). for the rest of the images make a lazy load logic. but not just setting the src= to blank, but insert the whole img tag onload (or onscroll, or whatever) into your code.
having a lot of broken img tags in the HTML for non javacript users (i.e.: google, old mobile devices, textviewer) is not a good idea (you will not get a penalty as long as the lazy loaded images are not missleading) but shitty markup is never a good idea.
for general SEO question please visit https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/ (stack overflow is more for programing related questions)
I have to disagree with Alex. Google recently updated its algorithm to account for page load time. According to the official Google blog
...today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
However, it is important to keep in mind that the most important aspect of SEO is original, quality content.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
I have been added lazyload to my site (http://www.amphorashoes.ro) and i have better pagerank from google (maybe because the content is loading faster) :)
first,don't use src="",it may hunt your page,make a small loading image instead it.
second,I think it won't affect SEO, actually we always use alt="imgDesc.." to describe this image, and spider may catch this alt but not analyse this image what id really be.
I found this tweet regarding Google's SEO
There are various ways to lazy-load images, it's certainly worth
thinking about how the markup could work for image search indexing
(some work fine, others don't). We're looking into making some clearer
recommendations too.
12:24 AM - 28 Feb 2018
John Mueller - Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst
From what I understand, it looks like it depends on how you implement your lazy loading. And Google is yet to recommend an approach that would be SEO friendly.
Theoretically, Google should be running the scripts on websites so it should be OK to lazy load. However, I can't find a source(from Google) that confirms this.
So it looks like crawling lazy loaded or deferred images may not be full proof yet. Here's an article I wrote about lazy loading image deferring and seo that talks about it in detail.
Here's working library that I authored which focuses on lazy loading or deferring images in an SEO friendly way .
What it basically does is cancel the image loading when DOM is ready and continue loading the images after window load event.
...
<div>My last DOM element</div>
<script>
(function() {
// remove the all sources!
})();
window.addEventListener("load", function() {
// return all the sources!
}, false);
</script>
</body>
You can cancel loading of an image by removing it's src value or replacing it with a placeholder image. You can test this approach with Google Fetch
You have to make sure that you have the correct src until DOM is ready so to be sure that Google Fetch will capture your imgs original src.
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I am charging SEO of my company's SEO, which I really hate. I believe a web site with decent web design and semantic code(structure), spiced up with attractive content is the best thing we should do. Yet, we are still far from there, in me case especially. So usually I take a very close look at other sites, their design, code, etc. And I suspect I got paranoid on this.
Today, I find a highly respected site which is using absolute internal links while we are using relative links. As far as I know, it does not matter, but I can not help asking you guys to make sure about this.
If this is a ridiculous question, then I am sorry. As I said I become a paranoia.
Taken from the Search Engine Optimisation FAQ at the SitePoint Forums:
Should I use relative links or absolute links?
Absolute links. It is recommended by Google as it is possible for crawlers to miss some relative links.
If I can find the link that Google states this I'll update this post.
EDIT: This might be what the post is referring to, but I've stated my reasons as to why this might be correct in the comments.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35156
I never heard or seen anything that indicates it matters. All you're likely to do is complicate your development. The "highly respected" site is getting good ranking because it's popular, that's all.
It's pretty well a given that search engines store the full path at some point, it's unlikely they wouldn't perform this conversion during the crawl process to remove duplicates.
I don't really follow your logic anyway. You know good structure, relevant content and popularity are the key to ranking so what makes you think you'll gain anything by spending even a minute on random optimisations like this?
I highly doubt Google will be missing any relative links. Apparently the latest version of their Crawler will even execute some javascript. Don't bother with absolute links, instead, great a good sitemap and submit it to google through webmaster tools. Yahoo and Microsoft also allow you to submit your sitemap so it might be worthwhile to look into that too - google it.
I don't think there is an answer to this question, but I will weigh in anyways. Personally,
I think that using absolute URLs is the best. The web is full of crappy content scrapers. Many of the people who wrote these scrapers forget to change the original URLs (in absolute links) before they post the content onto their own page. So, in that regard, absolute URLs can turn into a really dodgy way to get a couple extra links.
If I follow that, it seems logical that absolute links would also be a great indicator of duplicate content caused by content scrapers.
A couple of years ago, I did some research into what happens to a page's search rankings when you dramatically change content/navigation (ie - in the case of a dramatic re-design). At that point, I found that having absolute URLs seemed to spook Google a little less. But, there were some problems with my research:
a) The 'absolute URL bonus' was barely quantifiable (an average of less than two positions of difference)
b) The 'absolute URL bonus' only lasted a few weeks before Google settled down and started treating both pages the same
c) The research is two years old and the Google algorithm has changed dramatically in that time
When I add a and b together, I'm left with a very unsettled feeling. Google gets a little weird from time to time, so the bonus may have been a fluke that I attributed to absolute URLs. Good old experimental bias.....Either way though, the difference was so slight and lasted for such a short time that I don't think it is worth spending a whole lot of extra time making absolutes!
Best of luck with your site
Greg
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Most sites at least employ server access log checking and banning along with some kind of bot prevention measure like a CAPTCHA (those messed-up text images).
The problem with CAPTCHAs is that they poss a threat to the user experience. Luckily they now come with user friendly features like refresh and audio versions.
Anyway, like linux vs windows, it isn't worth the time of a spammer to customize and/or build a script to handle a custom CAPTCHA example that only pertains to one site. Therefore, I was wondering if there might be better ways to handle the whole CAPTCHA thing.
In A Better CAPTCHA Peter Bromberg mentions that one way would be to convert the image to HTML and display it embedded in the page. On http://shiflett.org/ Chris simply asks users to type his name into an input. Examples like this are ways to simplifying the CAPTCHA experience while decreasing the value for spammers. Does anyone know of more good examples I could use or see any problem with the embedded image idea?
Image presented as HTML table is just a technical speed bump. There's no difficulty in extraction of pixels from such document.
IMHO CAPTCHA puts focus on a wrong thing – you're not interested whether there's a human on the other side. You wouldn't like human to spam you either. So take a step back and focus on spam:
Analyze text (look for spammy keywords, use bayesian filtering)
Analyze links (blacklist spammy domains – SURBL, LinkSleeve)
Look at traffic patterns and block floods
There's no single perfectly accurate method, but you can use few of them and weight the result to get pretty close.
Have a look at source code of Sblam! (it's a completely transparent server-side comment spam filter).
Alternatives to captchas are going to be to consider the problem from other angles. The reason for this is because captchas are built around the idea that a human and computer actor can be distinguished. As Artificial intelligence progresses, this will always become an increasingly difficult problem as the gap between computer and human users shrinks.
The technique used here on slashdot is for other users of the site to act as gatekeepers, marking abuse and removing offending posts before they become noticeable to a wide audience.
Another technique is to detect spam-like posts directly, using the same technology used to filter spam from email. Obviously it isn't 100% effective for email, and wont be for other uses, either, but if you can filter out 75% of the spam with very few false positives being filtered, then other techniques will only have to deal with the remaining 25%.
Keep a log of spam-related activity, so that you can track trends about offending ip addresses, content of posts, claimed user agent, and so forth, so that you can block abusive users at a routing level.
In nearly all cases, your users would rather put up with the slight inconvenience of abuse prevention, than the huge inconvenience of a major spam problem.
Ultimately, the arms race between you and spammers is one of cost-benefit. Initially, it will cost spammers close to nothing to spam your site, but you can change that to make it very difficult. Even if they continue to spam your site, the benefit they recieve will never grow beyond a few innocent users falling for their schemes. Once the cost of spamming rises sharply above the benefit, the spammers will go away.
Another way to benefit from that is to allow advertising on your site. Make it inexpensive (but not free, of course) and easy for legitimate advertisers to post responsible marketing material for your users to see. Would be spammers may find that it is a better deal to just pay you a few dollars and get their offering seen than to pursue clandestine methods.
Obviously most spammers won't fit in this category, since that is often more about getting your users to fall victim to malware exploits. You can do your part for that by encouring users to use modern, up to date browsers or plugins so that they become less vulnerable to those same exploits.
This article describes a technique based on hashed field names (changing with each page view) with some of them being honeypot fields (i.e. the request is rejected if they're filled) that are hidden from human users via various techniques.
Basically, it relies on spam scripts not being sophisticated enough to determine which form fields are actually visible. In a way, that is a CAPTCHA, since in order to solve it reliably, not only would they have to implement HTML, CSS and JavaScript fully, they'd also have to recognize when a field is too small to see, colored the same as the background, hidden behind another field, placed outside the browser's viewport, etc.
It's the same basic problem that makes Web Standards a farce: there is no algorithm to determine whether a webpage "looks right" - only a human can decide that.
seen this?
It's a system with cute pictures instead of captcha ;)
But I still think honeypots are a better solution - they're so cheap&easy&invisible
I really think that Dinah hit the nail on the head. The fact seems to be that the beauty of the whole CAPTCHA setup is that there is no standard. Standardizing would only help the market to be more profitable.
Therefore it seems that the best way to handle the CAPTCHA problem is to come up with a fairly hard system for bots to catch that is NOT used by anyone else on the planet. It could be a question system, a very custom image creator, or even a mix of JS calls that only browsers respect.
By the time that your site is big enough for spammers to care you should have the budget to rethink your CAPTCHA setup and optimize it much more. In the mean time we should be monitoring our server logs and banning bad agents, refers, and IP's.
In my case I created a CAPTCHA image that I believe is very different from any other CAPTCHA I have seen. This should do fine for now along side my Apache logs + htaccess banning and Aksimet checking. Maybe I should spend time on a reporting feature as well.
although not a true image captcha, good turing test is asking users a random question - common options are: is ice hot or cold? 5+2= ..? etc.
I'm working on a website on which I am asked to add to the homepage's footer a list of all the products that are sold on the website along with a link to the products' detail pages.
The problem is that there are about 900 items to display.
Not only that doesn't look good but that makes the page render a lot slower.
I've been told that such a technique would improve the website's visibility in Search Engine.
I've also heard that such techniques could lead to the opposite effect: google seeing it as "spam".
My question is: Is listing products of a website on its homepage really efficient when it comes to becoming more visible on search engines?
That technique is called keyword stuffing and Google says that it's not a good idea:
"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Now you might want to ask: Does their crawler really realize that the list at the bottom of the page is just keyword stuffing? Well, that's a question that only Google could answer (and I'm pretty sure that they don't want to). In any case: Even if you could make a keyword stuffing block that is not recognized, they will probably improve they algorithm and -- sooner or later -- discover the truth. My recommendation: Don't do it.
If you want to optimize your search engine page ranking, do it "the right way" and read the Search Engine Optimization Guide published by Google.
Google is likely to see a huge list of keywords at the bottom of each page as spam. I'd highly recommend not doing this.
When is it ever a good idea to specify 900 items to a user? good practice dictates that large lists are usually paginated to avoid giving the user a huge blob of stuff to look through at once.
That's a good rule of thumb, if you're doing it to help the user, then it's probably good ... if you're doing it purely to help a machine (ie. google/bing), then it might be a bad idea.
You can return different html to genuine users and google by inspecting the user agent of the web request.
That way you can provide the google bot with a lot more text than you'd give a human user.
Update: People have pointed out that you shouldn't do this. I'm leaving this answer up though so that people know it's possible but bad.
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In SEO there are a few techniques that have been flagged that need to avoided at all costs. These are all techniques that used to be perfectly acceptable but are now taboo. Number 1: Spammy guest blogging: Blowing up a page with guest comments is no longer a benefit. Number 2: Optimized Anchors: These have become counterproductive, instead use safe anchors. Number 3: Low Quality Links: Often sites will be flooded with hyperlinks that take you to low quality Q&A sites, don’t do this. Number 4: Keyword Heavy Content: Try and avoid too many of these, use longer well written sections more liberally. Number 5: Link-Back Overuse: Back links can be a great way to redirect to your site but over saturation will make people feel trapped
Content, Content, CONTENT! Create worthwhile content that other people will want to link to from their sites.
Google has the best tools for webmasters, but remember that they aren't the only search engine around. You should also look into Bing and Yahoo!'s webmaster tool offerings (here are the tools for Bing; here for Yahoo). Both of them also accept sitemap.xml files, so if you're going to make one for Google, then you may as well submit it elsewhere as well.
Google Analytics is very useful for helping you tweak this sort of thing. It makes it easy to see the effect that your changes are having.
Google and Bing both have very useful SEO blogs. Here is Google's. Here is Bing's. Read through them--they have a lot of useful information.
Meta keywords and meta descriptions may or may not be useful these days. I don't see the harm in including them if they are applicable.
If your page might be reached by more than one URL (i.e., www.mysite.com/default.aspx versus mysite.com/default.aspx versus www.mysite.com/), then be aware that that sort of thing sometimes confuses search engines, and they may penalize you for what they perceive as duplicated content. Use the link rel="canoncial" element to help avoid this problem.
Adjust your site's layout so that the main content comes as early as possible in the HTML source.
Understand and utilize your robots.txt and meta robots tags.
When you register your domain name, go ahead and claim it for as long of a period of time as you can. If your domain name registration is set to expire ten years from now rather than one year from now, search engines will take you more seriously.
As you probably know already, having other reputable sites that link to your site is a good thing (as long as those links are legitimate).
I'm sure there are many more tips as well. Good luck!
In addition to having quality content, content should be added/updated regularly. I believe that Google (an likely others) will have some bias toward the general "freshness" of content on your site.
Also, try to make sure that the content that the crawler sees is as close as possible to what the user will see (can be tricky for localized pages). If you're careless, your site may be be blacklisted for "bait-and-switch" tactics.
Don't implement important text-based
sections in Flash - Google will
probably not see them and if it does,
it'll screw it up.
Google can Index Flash. I don't know how well but it can. :)
A well organized, easy to navigate, hierarchical site.
There are many SEO practices that all work and that people should take into consideration. But fundamentally, I think it's important to remember that Google doesn't necessarily want people to be using SEO. More and more, google is striving to create a search engine that is capable of ranking websites based on how good the content is, and solely on that. It wants to be able to see what good content is in ways in which we can't trick it. Think about, at the very beginning of search engines, a site which had the same keyword on the same webpage repeated 200 times was sure to rank for that keyword, just like a site with any number of backlinks, regardless of the quality or PR of the sites they come from, was assured Google popularity. We're past that now, but is SEO is still , in a certain way, tricking a search engine into making it believe that your site has good content, because you buy backlinks, or comments, or such things.
I'm not saying that SEO is a bad practice, far from that. But Google is taking more and more measures to make its search results independant of the regular SEO practices we use today. That is way I can't stress this enough: write good content. Content, content, content. Make it unique, make it new, add it as often as you can. A lot of it. That's what matters. Google will always rank a site if it sees that there is a lot of new content, and even more so if it sees content coming onto the site in other ways, especially through commenting.
Common sense is uncommon. Things that appear obvious to me or you wouldn't be so obvious to someone else.
SEO is the process of effectively creating and promoting valuable content or tools, ensuring either is totally accessible to people and robots (search engine robots).
The SEO process includes and is far from being limited to such uncommon sense principles as:
Improving page load time (through minification, including a trailing slash in URLs, eliminating unnecessary code or db calls, etc.)
Canonicalization and redirection of broken links (organizing information and ensuring people/robots find what they're looking for)
Coherent, semantic use of language (from inclusion and emphasis of targeted keywords where they semantically make sense [and earn a rankings boost from SE's] all the way through semantic permalink architecture)
Mining search data to determine what people are going to be searching for before they do, and preparing awesome tools/content to serve their needs
SEO matters when you want your content to be found/accessed by people -- especially for topics/industries where many players compete for attention.
SEO does not matter if you do not want your content to be found/accessed, and there are times when SEO is inappropriate. Motives for not wanting your content found -- the only instances when SEO doesn't matter -- might vary, and include:
Privacy
When you want to hide content from the general public for some reason, you have no incentive to optimize a site for search engines.
Exclusivity
If you're offering something you don't want the general public to have, you need not necessarily optimize that.
Security
For example, say, you're an SEO looking to improve your domain's page load time, so you serve static content through a cookieless domain. Although the cookieless domain is used to improve the SEO of another domain, the cookieless domain need not be optimized itself for search engines.
Testing In Isolation
Let's say you want to measure how many people link to a site within a year which is completely promoted with AdWords, and through no other medium.
When One's Business Doesn't Rely On The Web For Traffic, Nor Would They Want To
Many local businesses or businesses which rely on point-of-sale or earning their traffic through some other mechanism than digital marketing may not want to even consider optimizing their site for search engines because they've already optimized it for some other system, perhaps like people walking down a street after emptying out of bars or an amusement park.
When Competing Differently In An A Saturated Market
Let's say you want to market entirely through social media, or internet cred & reputation here on SE. In such instances, you don't have to worry much about SEO.
Go real and do for user not for robots you will reach the success!!
Thanks!