Apparently, infinite scrolling is the latest trend in the SEO market with webmaster incessantly developing infinite scrolling on their webpage. With popular social media sites like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Facebook embracing the infinite scrolling website, there is an ample of other websites which are now following suit.
But making your webpage infinitely scrollable is only the first initiative you have to take. If your site is not properly optimized, scrolling websites can cause a lot of trouble for Googlebot which directly results in your website getting a lower rank in the search engine.
We would have all ignored the implications of designing your website for infinite scrolling if Matt Cutts hadn’t brought the issue to the table at Pubcon Keynote. He suggested last year that sotes also have static links with the pagination structure which enables the bots to crawl the pages correctly without any mistakes. Albeit Google is doing a fine job with the infinite scrolling of a web page, other online search engines don’t necessarily do a good job of crawling the page because the bots don’t wait around for the pages to endlessly load.
An ample amount of websites with infinite scrolling features don’t have a pagination structure which paves the way for the crawler to properly discover the contents content on the site. In other situations, the crawling of the page completely goes haywire once the JavaScript is disabled and there is no alternative of non-JavaScript in place of the previous one.
There are websites with great looking infinite scrolling features if you go online, but unfortunately, most of them lack the proper structure which has to be appropriate for crawlers to properly read the content regardless of any aspects of the pages of the website. If you are unnerved thinking about if your infinite scrolling is search friendly or not, then you should read one of the blog post on Webmaster Central Blog which specifically deals with the issue and provides you with a viable solution. With the new blog post, you will be availed with the best practices which will ensure that all the content of your page has been properly crawled by Googlebot and other bots respectively. Structuring your Urls, structuring pagination when JavaScript is disabled and the proper configuration of the head of your page are something that the blog post will meticulously deal in.
For visitors who are visiting these sites which have infinite scrolling, Mueller doles out advices for visitors which will enable them to correctly find what they are looking for in the page. The user that has come on the page has to be able to find the specific content without any hassle of infinitely scrolling the pages for an extended period of time which will eventually drive him to seek for other websites instead of your. In certain websites, the specific content has been places so far from the viewed lists that it literally becomes impossible for the user to land on that content.
Due to overlaps in the pagination structure, there are usually duplicate contents on the site which is something Google wants webmasters to be aware of. In order for you to fully optimize your site with an infinite scrolling feature that is so prevalent out there, you will have to have an intrinsic knowledge about what constitutes as the right practices and right implications on search engine.
