Google is able to crawl pages that utilize infinite scrolling to a certain extent. Here’s how it works and how it affects SEO.
The topic was discussed in a Google Search Central SEO office hour hangout recorded on February 18.
A man named Nick Jabbour joined the livestream to ask Google’s search advocate John Mueller a series of questions about paginated content.
One of the questions involved infinite scrolling and whether Googlebot has evolved to the point that it can handle it.
The short answer is: YesGooglebot can crawl and index pages that utilize infinite scrolling.
However, there are limitations how much Infinite scrolling Googlebot can handle.
For more information, read on to the next section for Mueller’s full response.
Google limits infinite scrolling to crawling pages
When asked if Googlebot could handle infinite scrolling, Mueller said:
“A little bit … I thought we had a page on that, but I think we might not actually be done.”
As early as 2014, Google released help file Titled “Infinite Scroll Search Friendly Recommendations”.
Given that the page is nearly 10 years old, it is unlikely that Mueller was referring to the page. But the information in the help documentation is still available today.
This page contains instructions for coding a web page with infinite scrolling in a manner similar to a paginated series.
You could go this route by implementing infinite scrolling, but it’s probably not required.
As Mueller goes on to explain, Googlebot may render all or most of your pages the way it has been set up:
“Essentially, when we render a page, we use a fairly high viewport, like you have a very long screen. We render the page to see what the page will display.
Typically this will trigger a certain amount of infinite scroll in whatever JavaScript method you use to trigger infinite scroll. Whatever ends up being loaded there, that’s what we’ll be able to index.
So depending on how you implement infinite scrolling, we may have this long page in our index. “
Mueller goes on to say that Googlebot may not render everything On your page, it depends on the length of the page and how infinite scroll is triggered.
The best way to find out how many pages Google can crawl is to use a URL inspection tool.
“It might not be that we have everything that fits that page, because depending on how you trigger the infinite scroll, it might be oh, you’re just loading the next page or something.
Then we might load two or three of these pages on an infinite scrolling page, but not all.
So that’s where I recommend testing with an inspection tool to see how much Google actually gets. “
As Mueller said, the URL inspection tool renders the page that Googlebot sees.
From there you can decide if any adjustments need to be made.
Hear Mueller’s full response in the video below:
Featured image: fran_kie/Shutterstock
