You think infinite scroll is cool? Search-friendly infinite scroll is even cooler! We just
announced on the Webmaster
Central Blog how to make infinite scroll pages more search-friendly, helping search
engines access all the individual items in the category/gallery so the content is available in
search results.
With some implementations of infinite scroll, crawlers aren’t great at scrolling down or
clicking “load more”, so they may not crawl items displayed after the initial page load. To
help the crawler see all the content, we recommend converting the infinite scroll page to
paginated series by using the HTML5
History API. (Of course, the pagination is seamless to the user.)
Infinite scroll page is made “search-friendly” when converted to a paginated series.
Each component page has a similar <title> with rel=next/prev values declared in
the <head>.
Here’s a demo of infinite scroll with
pagination. The demo isn’t production-ready, but the key search engine-friendly
points to note are:
Coverage: All individual items are accessible. With traditional infinite
scroll, individual items displayed after the initial page load aren’t discoverable to
crawlers.
No overlap: Each item is listed only once in the paginated series (that is, no
duplication of items).
John Mueller is a Webmaster
Trends Analyst in Zurich, working with webmasters and Google engineers to make the web better.
In his time off, he builds robots with his kids to take over the world (or at least mow the
lawn).
By John
Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst