Today’s SEO issues are very specific, but the questions and suggestions may apply to many situations.
Annika of Stockholm asked:
“We have four websites with many destination pages and many hotels listed in them. Our UX department decided to display a list of 10 hotels, and then a button. When the button is clicked, it will be added to the list The other 10 hotels, and so on. The URL remains the same, but has different parameters.
From an SEO perspective, how can I ensure that all hotel pages are indexed?
There are many images in the list, so due to speed reasons, “View All” cannot be selected.So far, we have used a solution rel=next and rel=prev, But I have read that Google no longer supports this solution.
Due to user experience, infinite scrolling and traditional paging are not an option. So, what is the best practice here?
I have been struggling with this for many years and I am very grateful for being able to solve my predicament. “
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Good question, Annika.
Just because search engines no longer support rel=prev and rel=next does not necessarily mean that websites must redesign their websites or remove these tags.
For anyone who is curious, there is no harm in leaving a label. They will not hurt you.
However, the core of this problem is how to handle paging in a way that is friendly to users and search engines.
When I consider this question, I have to wonder why traditional paging and infinite scrolling are not UX options? In terms of user experience, neither of these are inherently bad.
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Both can be done well to make SEO, development, UX, and accessibility teams happy.
Quick solution
The fastest, easiest, and cheapest (but not the best) way to improve this situation is to use a site map.Make sure all your property is listed in your XML sitemap, For beginners.
This is not the best solution because there are still no internal site links to the page, but at least it will help the engine crawl them when you solve the solution in other ways.
You should also consider Add “All Hotels” sitemap page.
The page can be linked from your footer or HTML sitemap, and it can be a nice list organized by country/state, and there can even be a country/state page to help search engines lead search engines to a good Crawling path.
If you cannot implement the suggestions I will make below, this is a workaround, but I said we will start with a quick workaround.
Better solution
Before writing this article, I quickly browsed the major hotel brands and hotel search sites to see what they are doing.
In terms of user experience, it’s everywhere, but most of them have some kind of quick fix mentioned above and also use Infinite scroll, Form interaction and old-fashioned paging.
The method I recommend is to let your UX team keep the buttons (although buttons have various other issues beyond the scope of this article), but also let them Add some traditional pagination For you and it.
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When search engines get good crawlable links, users will get a nice form/application feel. Users can even get links that they can share and send to people.
You can like this very much and keep a URL in the href=value of the link, while still using Javascript to maintain the feel of the application when clicked, and use something like pushState to change the URL without reloading the page.
Look SEO-friendly pagination: the complete best practice guide learn more.
Give and receive
Corporate SEO or SEO for large websites It’s all about giving and taking; it’s about knowing why to fight and what to give in.
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In Annika’s case, I will arrange meetings with UX and developers, and put the SEO requirements there, simple and clear.
Tell them, “We need a crawlable path to all hotel pages outside the site map. How can we do this in this user experience?” Then look at where the brainstorm is going.
More resources:
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Ask SEO It is a weekly SEO advice column written by some of the top SEO experts in the industry carefully selected by search engine magazines. Have a question about SEO? Fill out our form. You may see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!
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