Search friendly development
Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008
This session dealt with some of the common web site development issues that impact search engine crawling & indexing of your site, which can have a big impact on your site’s presence & ranking in search engines.
Amplify Interactive audits every single client web site for these issues when performing site audits during our research & recommendations phase. We also educate the developers & designers that our clients work with on these issues when they are developing or redesigning client sites.
Nathan Buggia – Microsoft
Some things to pay attention to for your site:
- Load times – the faster your pages load, the more of your site that a search engine will crawl
- All flash sites and using cloaking as a workaround = bad (he used an example from Nike, who apparently does a lot of this)
Sharad Verma – Yahoo
Web site development & search engine considerations
- Search engines don’t speak javascript, turn off JS in browser & navigate your site to look for issues (I give this tip in every SEO speaking session that I do)
- All flash/video = bad; text & links = better
- Dynamic urls – lead to duplicate content & splits link juice, less likely to be crawled & indexed
- 301 redirect dynamic to static, limit the number of paramaters
Use Yahoo Site Explorer & other search engine webmaster tools
- Rewrite dynamic urls through yahoo site explorer
- Tell yahoo about dynamic urls & remove session id’s etc
- We’ll aggregate link weights
Duplicate content
- Less effective crawl
- Search engines are less likely to extract links…
- Solve by using 301 or disallow duplicate content via robots.txt
Best practices
- Flatten folder structure – deeper content (meaning, multiple directories in your URLs) is less likely to be indexed
- Redirect old pages
- Use keywords in urls
- Use sub domains ONLY when appropriate
- Remove file extension from URL if you can (.asp, .html, etc)
- Use robots.txt exclusion to eliminate content from indexing – see http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000587.htm
Maile Ohye – Google
Develop a crawlable architecture for rich media
- Build on html, then add ajax & flash to enhance html version of site
- Alternate versions aren’t a good alternative, splits link juice & user experience (can’t share the same thing etc)
- YouTube is a good example of progressive enhancement: they put one “thing” (video) on each page, the site navigation is in html, they put descriptive html content next to rich media
- Consider sIFR for flash: text matches content seen by enabled users, accessible to screen readers and search engines (see Google Webmaster blog “Best uses of flash” & Google Webmaster Central help “Working with flash…”)
- Alternate for AJAX: consider Hijax for AJAX (see Google Webmaster blog “A spider’s view of Web 2.0” & Google Webmaster Central help “Working with AJAX enhanced sites“)
Tips to improve the indexing of your site
- Set preferred domain to www or non-www, then 301 redirect to the other
- Reduce duplicate content by keeping URLs clean: remove unnecessary paramaters, internally link to your preferred version, store visitor information in cookies rather than session id’s
- Planning server downtime for maintenance? Make sure you serve a 503 not a 404
Related Links & Coverage
