Single Page Websites

[NooseLadder]

Hi,

Recently I have been seeing a rise in the number of single page websites, you know the ones that use 

<a href="#chapter4">See also Chapter 4.</a>

<h2><a id="chapter4">Chapter 4</a></h2>
<p>This chapter explains about...</p>
 

and with a bit of jQuery to smooth the ride (scrolling) to that section.

Some of you may even have made one or two yourselves. I like some sites that I have seen and would like to try this approach but I do have some reservations about the SEO aspects.

As you know, search engines index single pages of websites and use the content as well as many other factors to rank that page according to the search string entered by the user. Single pages usually have content about a specific subject, however single page websites will have content about everything the website talks about.

Have you got any thoughts about how this may affect sites that need to get ranked highly in the search engines? Or, maybe you have got evidence to show this?

[onjegolders]

Hi Noose, am currently working on a single-page site from a new agency and really like how it performs. I'm hopeful that in my case the content is all quite similar and about one main subject that SEO-wise it won't take as much as a hit. If you have a site which contains lots of different areas of content and departments, I don't think it would work as well.

On the flipside, I've seen many agencies who have links at the bottom of their page to web-design-london, web-design-birmingham and so on and soforth. This will probably give them an SEO advantage but I feel like they're losing a lot of credibility in the process.

Sorry I can't give you more of a knowledgable answer, I'm sure others will do but for me, if the theme for the site fits the model, then use it.

[ryan]

From an SEO standpoint, I think it's clear that you'd be making some compromises by putting everything on one page. It means less-specific pages in terms of content, so less likely to match specific keywords. But for a site that really benefits from being on one page, maybe those benefits outweigh the SEO aspect. I think that the more you focus on catering to what is right for your audience and content, the less SEO even matters. If you put up something that's going to drive quality incoming links, the value of those links is going to carry more weight than anything you compromised in structure. 

But seems like it'd be possible to also do it without compromises as well. You could build it as a multi-page site and then have the single-page nature derive from javascript ajax calls. Meaning, if you visit on a JS-capable browser, you get the progressively-enhanced version. If you visit on a non-JS browser, you get the multi-page version. Just so Google doesn't think you are trying to do some JS monkey business (if they can even tell?), you'd probably still want to make the multi-page version accessible to the enhanced version, perhaps via footer nav or sitemap link. 

[Joss]

Depending on what the site is achieving, SEO can be of very low importance.

Take my site http://www.dancingbear.co.uk - although on very specialised keywords it performs incredibly well, I have only once got work directly from the site. My audience is too specialised and still rely on professional directories and mostly word of mouth recommendation.

So my site is basically a place I send people to, rather than they find automatically, and they just want to hear music show reels when they get there. So, apart from a couple of bits no one reads, that is what it is dedicated to.

Hence the loud noises available on the home page

[panictree]

Hi Noose,

This thread, in Google Webmaster Help, addresses your question. JohnMu, a googler, sees it this way:

I'd generally recommend a more traditional site format. It's complicated for search engines to understand a "one-page" site like that, given that there is so much information on a single page. It's much easier for our algorithms to focus on individual pages with content that matches the same context. Additionally, as Becky mentioned (thanks!), it could be extremely confusing to the user to see basically an empty page when they expect to find content based on a search that they've made.

If you go down the Ajax route, as Ryan mentions, you might find this website interesting:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/getting-started

I hope that helps.

Claudio