My site has two basic types of pages:
A list page, with lists of items. Each item drives to #2, a detail page.
The detail page. One piece of content from a section, like "News" or "Blog Posts". Sometimes, these detail pages are paginated, e.g., "Page 1 of A Long List".
I'm very confused about how rel=next/prev is implemented.
Should I be using prev/next for showing Google that a page is "Page 1 of All Blog Posts" and "next" is "Page 2 of All Blog Posts"? Or should I exclude them from my list pages?
For single-page detail pages, should I be using rel=prev/next to link to the next and previous detail pages from the set?
For multi-page detail pages, I know that I should link pages with prev/next tags, but what should the last page have? It would seem that using next/prev on the last page of a paginated detail page could be misleading to crawlers.
Thanks!
It may be you don't need to do anything at all. If the content within the series tends to stay put, the URLs are numbered, etc., Google's probably working it out for itself.
Don't use prev/next between single-page pages. The idea with prev/next is that a single piece of content which stretches over multiple pages is treated as a whole, so applying it to single-page pieces of content, even if they can be considered as part of some group or set, would be to their detriment.
First page in a series only has the "next" tag, last page only has the "prev" tag. All the rest have both.
And incidentally, if your pagination is done with parameters, you have an alternative in that you can use Google Webmaster Tools to inform Googlebot how to handle your pagination.
If you find anything confusing in the article(link below) than just let us know. And if you completely understand the article and the article about "view all"(link in the article) than I think your problem is solved.
Pagination with rel='next' and rel='prev'
Related
I'm working on a site to help students with ACT prep, and I want to have a page where I can post explanations to questions that people submit. I want to be able to put a few tags on each post so that site visitors can click on or search whatever's relevant for them in the archives ("semicolons", "geometry", etc.) and all the relevant posts will come up, blog style. I'm very new to this, though, and I don't know how to do it or even what to search - when I search for tags I keep getting SEO recommendations, and that doesn't seem like the right thing.
Here's a solution (but it's not great)
It might be the only way to make what you want happen with a static HTML site.
You could, by hand, create pages that you fill with links to all of the posts that fit a certain category or "tag". For example, you could make a page that has links to all of your posts concerning geometry. Lets call this your archive page for geometry.
Then, when you include tags in a post, you would make each tag link to it's corresponding archive page.
Why do I say its not the best solution?
Virtually every blog that you see has a "back end" with a database that stores posts. When someone comes to your website and looks at a post, that posts data is inserted into a template and displayed to the user. You do not have to re-write the entire web page every time. Thing like the header, sidebar, footer, main page background etc are all in a template.
Having a database also lets you search the database and return relevant results. And a blog with a back end will typically let you write rules (or have them already written) that say, when you add a "tag" to a post, a link to that post should be automatically added to an archive page etc.
As far as I can tell you don't have database, so you'll just be linking static HTML pages. That means that every time you make a new post, you'll have to add a link to all of it's relevant archive pages by hand. Maybe you don't mind that now, but eventually it will be a nightmare to maintain.
I would strongly encourage you to look into a blogging platform like Wordpress to make your site. It will be more complicated to learn at first, but technology that's meant to do what you want it to do will ultimately be easier to use and maintain than technology that's simply meant to mark up a page.
I am writing a Tumblr theme and all went smoothly until I enabled the "ask box".
When I add the code for the ask box to my page, the box will appear on both my main page (where the posts are displayed), and also on my /ask page (which is the only page it should appear on).
I can't find anything on this issue in the tumblr documentation, and no themes I look at even have the tumblr ask box code in them.
The ask box doesn't need to be hard coded. Tumblr creates an ask page for you at '/ask' by using the permalink page style for text posts. The only thing you need to worry about coding in your theme is the ask link.
Make sure you wrap the ask link in the appropriate blocks - {block:AskEnabled} and {/block:AskEnabled}.
(All of this is the same for submit pages too. Just a slightly different block which can be found in the documentation).
This is a rephrasing of my original question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14516983/google-sites-trying-to-script-announcements-page-on-steroids:
I've been looking into ways to make subpages of a parent page appear in a grid like "articles" on the home page of my Google Site — like on a Joomla home page and almost like a standard "Announcements" template, except:
The articles should appear in a configurable order, not chronologically (or alphabetically).
The first two articles should be displayed full-width and the ones beneath in two columns.
All articles will contain one or more images, and at least the first one should be displayed.
The timestamp and author of each subpage/article shouldn't be displayed.
At the moment I don't care if everything except the ordering is hardcoded, but ideally there should be a place to input prefs like the number of articles displayed, image size, snippet length, css styling etc.
My progress so far:
I tried using an iframe with an outside-hosted Javascript (using google.feeds.Feed) that pulls the RSS feed from the "Announcements" template, but I can't configure the order of the articles. One possibility would be to have a number at the beginning of every subpage title and parse it, but it's going to mess up with time and the number would also be visible on the standalone article page. Or could the number be hidden with Javascript?
I tried making a spreadsheet with a row for each article with columns "OrderId", "Title", "Content", "Image" and process and format the data with a Google App Script (using createHTML and createImage), but a) there doesn't seem to be a way to get a spreadsheet image to show up inside the webapp and b) these articles are not "real" pages that can be linked to easily on the menus.
This feature would be super-useful for lots of sites, and to me it just seems odd that it isn't a standard gadget (edit: or template). Ideas, anyone?
I don't know if this is helpful, but I wanted something similar and used the RSS XML announcements feed within a Google Gadget embedded into my sites page
Example gadget / site:
http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/105840169337292240573/CBC_news_v3_1.xml
http://www.cambridgebridgeclub.org
It is badly written, messy and I'm sure someone could do better than me, but it seems to work fairly reliably. The xml seems to have all the necessary data to be able to chop up articles, and I seem to remember it has image urls as well, so can play with them (although not implemented in my gadget).
Apologies if I am missing the point. I agree with your feature request - it would be great not to have to get so low-level to implement stuff like this in sites....
I've got a large collection of pages on my site, each with unique content, but also with often redundant sidebar surrounding that content. I'm worried that this sidebar content is dragging down my site in Google, Bind, etc by diluting the results. What can I do to effectively hide this content from web spiders, but not my users?
Thanks!
It's just my gesture, but Google is smart enough to find out where is a navigation element and where are the content.
However, there might be various reasons why your website loosing positions. I would start from reading this help tipic, also keep in mind that Google search results are dynamic and once you reached first position does not guaranty that you would stay there, someone might just providing more unique content that match current subject and he would be pushed up.
If you want to make sure that search engines are aware about your document structure, and point them out what is what use microdata markup.
For example you can wrap a navigation in following format:
<ul itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement">
<li>
Home
</li>
...
</ul>
There after, your navigation items would appear in:
Google Webmaster Tools > Optimization > Structured Data
Also, by hiding your content with AJAX/JavaScript is more likely to harm your visitors who have disabled JavaScript or due to possible error in your library and in fact Google can understand and index asynchronous requests.
One thing you can do is not include it in the page mark-up and to load it in after page load using AJAX.
The sidebar won't affect your SEO efforts as it isn't duplicate content. Site navigation is expected to be on every page (and it is obviously very common). Duplicate content, from a search engine point of view, is when the page's primary content is identical or nearly identical, to another page's content.
A better solution would be to move your content to the top of the page and your navigation code down the bottom. Reposition stuff with CSS.
Otherwise, Ajax or put text into images.
Why on sites like Stack Overflow, Techcrunch, Smashing Magazine, etc. are the page titles (i.e. the text at the top of the page) clickable URLs that redirect to the same page that the user is on?
Some examples:
I believe that this does not effect SEO as search engines ignore internal links.
Is it for usability purposes?
It allows you to right-click on it and choose Copy link location (or equivalent) so that you can easily paste it in an email for example. This requires less time than copying it from the location bar, and some people run their browser without a visible location bar to save previous screen space.
More than anything, it provides a link to the default state of the page.
For example, for this very stack overflow page it is a user can get here through any of the following non-default links:
Why are Page Titles on some websites (including Stack Overflow) Clickable URLs?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/904381#foobar
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/904381?sort=date
While the default link is actually:
Why are Page Titles on some websites (including Stack Overflow) Clickable URLs?
If users are unable to get to the default state, they end up bookmarking or emailing the non-default link which propagates to new users and the problem just multiplies.
Clicking on the title link of the post will restore the default state and strip off any query parameters (?sort=date), named anchors (#foobar) and fix the story slug (/why-are-page-titles/...).
I use it to refresh the page (yes, I could press F5 too).
Yes Jakob Nielsen has stated that linking to yourself is a web design mistake (nr 10). And I agree.
More reading info here. (nr 10)
The URL redirects to the beginning of the page, in case you arrived on the page via a specific answer (all answers are also clickable URLs). This way, you get the URL of the question, not of an answer.
Not sure if this is why they did it, but I find it useful to siphon off tabs:
If I look at something briefly and think "I'd like to read this thoroughly in a minute but continue with what I was doing before", I can do this:
I can right click the link, click "open in a new tab" and then click "back" and continue nicely.
It's called a Permalink... The name implies what it is, a permanent link.
It's the same reason that each answer on SO has a link you can copy.
I think it inherits the behavior from CMS where each question is a node, which has 0<= answered question. Now think you go for a search on apache questions.
The result are displayed one after another.
In terms of CMS this is called a teaser. You get a full page with lots of questions where the question's title link to the full article(question + answers)
Its not a must, but you'll find it on most sites which uses a CMS.
As long as it does not harm anyone why would people be against it?
I prefer to have those links available as hitting refresh would reload all elements of the page instead of just following the direct link (to the same page) that uses cached elements.
Makes sense to me, I find it useful! I have a lot of tabs open so I just right click the link and go back.
To me this makes perfect sense, from a SEO view this is also good! It forces it to read the page because it's linked.
UX-wise clickable titles which don't bring the user anywhere may seem unusable though that leads us into the realm of Affordance Theory and whether or not the affordance is perceptible to users.
For example, clickable page titles may provide:
A simple method for bookmarking a page to the desktop from a browser window.
A context menu with additional choices allowing users to share a blog post or article.
A method for updating the location bar so it's pointing at the canonical URL of the page.
For the sites you mentioned, however, it seems more likely the page titles were turned into hyperlinks using absolute URLs so analytics tooling could pick up inbound link clicks – those sending the referer info – resulting in DCMA takedown notices when people copied work and didn't update the URLs.
You'd be surprised what people do when they're being incentivized to produce work contractually.