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Shakeerah822

: How to make Google index users posts when there are no direct links and the posts are loaded with infinite scroll? In a website that has posts system similar to Facebook, where the user has

@Shakeerah822

Posted in: #Google #Googlebot #Indexing #Search

In a website that has posts system similar to Facebook, where the user has option to:


Keep his posts private (needs login to view)
Make them public (anyone can see them)


In case #2 I want to allow Google to index these posts, but there are problems:


There are no direct links to the posts
The posts are loaded with infinite scroll style without pagination


Note that each post also has a permanent link that points to separate page with the post and all the comments on it.

Is it good strategy to index public posts? What is the best method to achieve that?

Edit:
I will accept 2 answers from Yhorian & Stephen Ostermiller.

Stephen Ostermiller delivered great point on not relying on dynamic site map for ranking in google, where he linked to The Sitemap Paradox, and his advice was great on creating links patterns between the pages.

Yhorian recommended a dynamic xml map for undiscoverable content.

I will use both solutions, a proper linking between pages and a dynamic site map to cover missing links.

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4 Comments

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@Heady270

Your current setup isn't good enough for SEO. To get Google to index content you have to:


Put each post on its own URL so that Google can deep link to it
Link to each post from other pages


Other answers suggest creating an XML sitemap. That isn't sufficient to solve the problem either. Google usually chooses not to index pages found only in an XML sitemap. Even if Google does index them, they won't rank well.

I would recommend:


Linking to the permanent URL of each post in the infinite scroll
On the permanent page include next and previous links
Link each post to 10 other related posts. Use criteria such as subject, tags, author.


Once the posts are well linked to each other, Google will rank all of them very nicely.

See The Sitemap Paradox in which this site had pretty much the same problem. When that question was asked, the site only linked to a few questions from the front page. Jeff Atwood was hoping that XML sitemaps would work better than they do. He created the "Related" links section that appears in the right column of this page. It is a solution that works very well. StackExchange questions tend to rank very well in Google now.

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@Miguel251

From your description, these are the recommendations I would make:


Create a sitemap with links to the unique post/comment links.
Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console/Bing Webmaster Tools.
Don't worry about ranking the AJAX infinite scrolling presentation. Make it optimal for users rather than search engines.


To explain further:
This strategy makes sure all your content is indexed and ranked optimally.

Google struggles with dynamically loaded content because it can't be sure what it's presenting to the user. Incosistancy means it would be unsure which queries to present your AJAX scrolling page to.

Fixed URLs are easier for it to index and rank. This content will lead people to your site to view the content they've searched for. The infinite scrolling 'front page' for this content can remain the way it is, don't touch it or try to 'noindex' it. Google will be able to understand it's a navigational page and rank it appropriately.

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@Samaraweera270

Content served with infinite scroll usually is not directly indexed because content loaded by javascript is ignored by crawlers.
If you have for each item the infinite scroll is loading a details-page you still can create a google-index in XML where the detail-pages are listed, like that the detail-pages are found only by the XML-page which is usually read only by crawlers.

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@Shanna517

If a post has a description then you can allow google to index that posts by descriptions except that private post have image or video that can't read by any site.
An infinite scroll is not a big deal you can download this type of code by just googling and in codepen or anywhere or you can do by giving load more button(thanks to JSON!).

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