Monday, February 17, 2014

Google's Advice On Infinite Crawl Pages & SEO

Google's John Mueller, Maile Ohye, and Joachim Kupke co-authored a technical blog post on the Google Webmaster Blog on how to make infinite scroll pages more search engine friendly.
The issue, as you can understand, is that GoogleBot and crawlers can't scroll down a page and thus can't load more content with that action. In Google;s blog post, they announced the definitive guide on how to make infinite scroll pages more search-friendly.
In short, Google is recommending that you convert the infinite scroll page to paginated series by using the HTML5 History API. John even made a demo page of infinite scroll that is search engine friendly.
click for full size

Google Drops New Webmaster Guideline On Not Blocking Google Ads

Yesterday we broke the news that Google added that you should not block Google ads within the technical requirements within Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
It seems Google has pulled the new line completely from their guidelines. It is unclear why but I suspect after I emailed them they reviewed it and found it to be confusing as well.
The new guideline that was added for about 24 hours read:
Make efforts to ensure that a robots.txt file does not block a destination URL for a Google Ad product. Adding such a block can disable or disadvantage the Ad.
As I explained, it was confusing because Google asks you specifically to block other ads from being crawled. But here, Google wants you to allow Google to crawl those ads. You and I understand why, because Google uses landing page quality score as part of AdWords ranking but still, it is confusing how they worded it.
Now, the language and the bullet point, is completely gone. The guidelines are back to how they were the day before.
Google has not responded to my request for clarification as of yet.