I have recently been doing a lot of reading on SEO with HTML5 (I am a Rails web developer), and have been doing a lot of work with microdata as I have seen that the Schema.org format is the preferred format of Google.
What I am wondering, is if somebody can explain to me the importance of also including a sitemap?
From what I understand, the crawlers just go through all the links on a page from wherever they come to your site, and then are able to gather all the data they need from well written microdata tags.
So what is the additional benefit of including a sitemap, and is it really worthwhile? It is possible that I am misunderstanding the purpose of a sitemap or the functionality of search engine crawlers.
A consumer can only read the Microdata if it found the document which contains it.
A sitemap is one way (of many ways) that allows consumers to find the document. A common other way is to follow hyperlinks (from plain HTML, no Microdata needed), but there may be sites that don’t link to every document, so consumers would not find these documents that way.
(If it’s worthwhile, e.g. if there’s a SEO benefit, depends on the consumer. A consumer can be a search engine bot, any other bot, a tool, a browser extension, etc.)
Related
I have an existing site built on Ruby on Rails. The site has around 20-30 pages. I am thinking about having a CMS to control the content that displays in each page.
I am thinking about setting up a Drupal instance and consume the content via REST API in the RoR site. Is this the right approach or is there an alternative approach?
This should be a common requirement for most of the sites out there but I don't find much information about this online. Is it because people setup their own CMS or is it because Drupal is not used for this purpose?
There's no harm in consuming the CMS data through its REST API. If it works for you, then well and good. But this is not a popular approach as when you change content, you'd often want to change your styles too which is not easily achieved via REST API and that's why people often opt to use a whole page from CMS.
You might want to check out our CMS https://scrivito.com
Good day!
I cannot find a complete description of the very items that make this concreate schema useful for business in SERP. I realy don't understand why should irganization markup schema if it provide no benefits in search result? isn't it easier to create an account in Google My Business or in some Catalog with reviews on it? In this case we can see the snippet with 'rating stars'.
For example, there are two sniipets from search result:
organization1 has Schema.org/Organization markup on its' page:
Search result snippet1
organization2 has no markup on its' site, but has it's page in catalog Yelp:
Search result snippet2
Moreover, I cannot understand how can "aggregateRating" (based on a collection of reviews or ratings, of the item) calculate this rating?
Please, can anyone explain it to me?
Check the FAQ section with regard to Schema.org in the About Section Answers related to your question are:
Q: What is the purpose of schema.org?
Schema.org is a joint effort, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, to
improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema supported
by major search engines. On-page markup helps search engines
understand the information on web pages and provide richer search
results. A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to
decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their
efforts. Search engines want to make it easier for people to find
relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and
applications that make use of the structure.
Q: Why are Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo! collaborating? Aren't you competitors?
Currently, there are many standards and schemas for marking up
different types of information on web pages. As a result, it is
difficult for webmasters to decide on the most relevant and supported
markup standards to use. Creating a schema supported by all the major
search engines makes it easier for webmasters to add markup, which
makes it easier for search engines to create rich search features for
users.
There's also a video on youtube about using schema for SEO for you business.
Structured data is a standardized format of code that is added to a web page. It communicates specific information about a page to Google. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content faster. In other words, it provides the context search engines need to properly categorize your site and recommend it more accurately for relevant search queries.
Google is using this data to make their search engine more accurate by creating a knowledge graph. This graph is an interconnected map of entities that follows the relationship between different terms, facts, data, dates, and more. This allows Google to go from keyword matching to a context-rich search engine, capable of differentiating the Taj Mahal monument from the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City.
What it means for SEOs is that Google has given you a way to introduce your client’s brands and companies into their knowledge graph, making them real objects Google knows about and can recommend to users. Check out our structured data guide on how to implement it on your site, including the recommended format for SEO and more on schema markups and aggregateRating.
I am building a blog for myself. Because it is relevant, here is the link: http://www.codetunnel.com. As you can see the page loads via AJAX so that I can do some stylish loading effects, among other things. It's actually a web-terminal that accepts commands and arguments and processes them via ajax; my URL structure executes these commands based on the URL passed in so that different pages can have unique URLs even though they are loaded via ajax. I've done past projects like this but have never cared much about optimizing the site for search engines, until this one.
Would a blog post being loaded via AJAX hurt its ability to be found by web crawlers? I'm assuming it would but I want your opinions before I decide how to move forward.
Thank you!
It depends. If you use unobtrusive javascript and progressive enhancement meaning that in your page you have links:
#Html.ActionLink("foo bar", "foo")
which would be AJAXified in some external js file, web crawlers will follow those links as all normal links and if the server returns content this content will be indexed just as all other content of your site. But if the url is built with javascript, then, no, it won't be indexed as crawlers normally do not execute javascript. I would also recommend you providing a sitemap as well.
I would say yes it would as from what I know the search engine wont see the loaded content, just the content from the initial page load.
Unless you use some kind of progressive enhancement (see this presentation), the main problem is that search engines will load and index only initial stuff.
As per my experience in search engine optimization yes, it will hurt rankings of the website. But now Google has proposed a proposal through which you can use Ajax to load the pages and at the same time it won't hurt your SEO efforts.
I've been told to understand how to maximize the visibility of an upcoming web application that is initially available in multiple languages, specifically French and English.
I am interested in understanding how the robots, like the google bot, scrapes a site that is available in multiple language.
I have a few questions concerning the behaviour of robots and indexing engines:
Should a web site specify the language in the URL?
Will a robot scrape a site in both language if the language is set through cookies (supposing a link that can change the language)?
Should I use a distinct domain for each language?
What meta tag could be used to help a robot in understanding the language of a web site?
Am I missing anything that I should be aware of?
Yes
No
Not necessarily, Google will infer the language. But if you use different TLD you probably get better exposure in specific countries, but you loss PageRank diluted in different domains.
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">
a. You should add a link in every page, to the same page in the other languages of the
site.
b. For SEO, it's better to use www.mysite.com/en/ that en.mysite.com because the PageRank is not diluted in different domains.
Should a web site specify the language in the URL?
No, not necessarily.
Will a robot scrape a site in both language if the language is set through cookies (supposing a link that can change the language)?
No. You should use a content-language attribute as suggested by Eduardo. Alternatively, <html lang='en'> will do the same job AFAIK.
What meta tag could be used to help a robot in understanding the language of a web site?
See above
Should I use a distinct domain for each language?
The Stack Overflow consensus (I'm sorry, I can't find for the life of me find the relevant questions! We had huge discussions on this, maybe they were closed as not programming related), is: Yes, have a different domain for each country if you want to maximize search engine visibility for that country.
Whenever I come across a cute website, I am always curious to know which web framework was used by its developers?
Being a novice in web development, a look at the page source doesn't give any clue.
Any way(s) to get this information? If possible, may be with a bit of Ruby magic, I can figure out things like: which is the most/least used framework for my favorite sites, audio/video heavy sites, etc.
Sometimes you can based on the URL patterns, or which scripts are included in the site ... but it's not a 100% predictor. You can write a site that completely masks the framework and simply delivers HTML/JS to the browser