Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO on dynamic website
-
Hi.
I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO.
They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created.
I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex?
Thanks
S
-
Yes if you're able to create a static page for each major city it will make it easier to put more relevant content into the page, take a look at this example from golfnow.com
Take a look at their sitemap: https://www.golfnow.com/sitemap.xml
They have page that are dynamically generated:
https://www.golfnow.com/tee-times/destination/park-city/hot-deals/search
And also page with static content:
https://www.golfnow.com/destinations/149-salt-lake-city
Booking.com have a somewhat similar approach as well, this is their page with static content
https://www.booking.com/city/us/san-francisco.en-gb.html
Hope this helps
-
Thanks - so should we use canonical to handle duplication that may occur by creating the static pages?
-
Thanks Joseph, should we create static pages and use canonical to handle duplication? Or should we use dynamic URL's in sitemaps?
Thanks
-
Be very careful with dynamic content. It is okay up to a point but it does have a number of SEO implications, although I think it's unlikely you would get a penalty.
One complication is, when a search engine crawls asset parameter and it delivers the specified page that will then be cashed by the search engine and delivered through the search results. The complication comes if a user comes to the side but has a different parameter set, they won't be able to see the content they came to get! That is a big problem, your bounce rate will be high which eventually could knock you out the rankings entirely.
I would take the professional approach...
Create static pages for all of your important content, if you want you could still include a little bit of dynamic content providing it doesn't change the page too much.
I would completely avoid the no index option, you have nothing to gain as far as I can see and it could cause a lot of damage.
-
Hello Sandra,
You will want to make sure that Google is indexing your page for all the locations, you can do that by "Fetch as Google" from search console as well as including those dynamically generated pages into your sitemap.xml.
Since your website can have as many pages as it is dynamically generated I would also create a sitemap for users, a great example would be Airbnb sitemap or Booking.com sitemap (These are sitemap for users, but Google crawl them too.)
You can also see their sitemap.xml specify in robots.txt
https://www.booking.com/robots.txt
https://www.airbnb.com/robots.txt
Here's some read that I think should be useful for you:
https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/3-seo-problems-on-listings-sites
https://thecontentworks.uk/dynamic-pages-seo-friendly/
Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is pagination SEO such a mystery in 2021?
Hi folks. I would like to discuss pagination. I use WordPress (Genesis, specifically). I ran my site through a site scan and it flagged an error which told me that my blog was producing duplicate meta descriptions because the blog is paginated - the same meta description from the blog page is being used on Page 2, Page 3 etc. I looked into this and the Internet is awash with many other people scratching around for a solution. My understanding is that using a canonical link on the first page is not a good idea, because it says to Google that only Page 1 of the blog is important. I also read an article that states Google no longer reads the Rel=Prev/Next code that could be used to tell Google to ignore the issue. So, what's the solution? Do I even need one? As a side-thought, it seems to me that pagination is, well, pretty useless. I mean, if my blog has 20 pages and I've worked hard to create content, who is going to click through to anywhere near page 20? Nobody. There has to be a smarter way for people on-site to access content. I would love your thoughts on all of this. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Should I optimize the login page? Will it affect the website SEO ranking?
I'm trying to resolve the site crawl issues that we have on our website. One of the links that has different issue types together is our login page. Currently we have two login pages that have the same content but different sub domains. **However I'm wondering if optimizing SEO on our login pages affects our website SEO ranking and if it's something better to do or not. ** To point out the details of the issues, the issue types that the logins pages have are "duplicate title", "duplicate content", "missing H1", "missing description", "thin content", "missing canonical tag" I'd appreciate your help, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kaylie0 -
Merging Pages and SEO
Hi, We are redesigning our website the following way: Before: Page A with Content A, Page B with Content B, Page C with Content C, etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. one page for each Customer Returns, Overstocks, Master Case, etc
Now: Page D with content A + B + C etc.
e.g. one long page containing all Product Conditions, one after the other So we are merging multiples pages into one.
What is the best way to do so, so we don't lose traffic? (or we lose the minimum possible) e.g. should we 301 Redirect A/B/C to D...?
Is it likely that we lose significant traffic with this change? Thank you,0 -
SEO time
I wanto to be in the top of the google search. I am usiing a lot of SEO tools but... I have done it during one month. Do I have to wait more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CarlosZambrana0 -
If you have an unlimited SEO budget, what would you do?
Here's a bit of background information: I've achieved the targets and is now being offered what is essentially an unlimited budget. I have a nice list of ideas but thought I would the brilliant people here at the SEOMOZ community what they would do. So as to promote as much response as possible, I'm going to keep my list to myself for now. And by "SEO", I mean I can do things like content strategy, blogging, infographics, etc. Shoot away!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0 -
Is DOCTYPE important for SEO?
Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis0 -
How do you implement dynamic SEO-friendly URLs using Ajax without using hashbangs?
We're building a new website platform and are using Ajax as the method for allowing users to select from filters. We want to dynamically insert elements into the URL as the filters are selected so that search engines will index multiple combinations of filters. We're struggling to see how this is possible using symfony framework. We've used www.gizmodo.com as an example of how to achieve SEO and user-friendly URLs but this is only an example of achieving this for static content. We would prefer to go down a route that didn't involve hashbangs if possible. Does anyone have any experience using hashbangs and how it affected their site? Any advice on the above would be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers1 -
Does capitalization matter for SEO?
Two places capitalization comes into play: (1) on-page use (title, h1, body text, img alt text, etc) (2) external anchor text I didn't think it mattered from Google's point of view for on-page usage (is this correct?) but I notice that OpenSiteExplorer' s 'anchor text distribution' tab shows different counts for the same keyword if it's capitalized in different ways (eg seomoz.org is listed separate from SEOmoz.org). Is that just OSE or does Google treat the keyword/phrase different based on its capitalization, too? And if so, then should I be creating external links to my site with the 'regular' and 'Capitalized' versions of my key phrases?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | scanlin1