The SEO Impact Of Load More Buttons

Transcription:

Hi, I’m Chris Long with Go Fish Digital, and welcome to another episode of “60 Second SEO”.

Today, we’re going to talk about Load More buttons and their implications on SEO.

Here I’m on the LA Times website, their business section. If I scroll all the way down to the bottom here, I can see that users are presented with the Load More button. So users will generally click this to load more content.

However, the implication here is this that Google actually won’t be able to crawl through this individual button. If I right click and click Inspect, I can see that it’s just formatted as a button. Right here, there is no actual page link presented, it is just a button element. That means Google can’t crawl through and see the content beneath it.

So here I’m going to click it. A user will be able to click this. But here, if I search for “Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers”, I go to the Rich Results test that really gives us an idea of how Google is rendering a page and then run that headline through. Google isn’t able to find any content related to that.

So if you’re using a Load More button, this is something that you’ll want to be aware of, is that users will be able to see the next set of content, but crawlers like Google won’t. And if you want to set that up, you need to actually have a site structure that is more conducive toward either infinite scroll or ensuring that actual href URLs appear in your Load More button. Users will be able to see the next set of content. Search engines like Google will not be able to.

About Chris Long

Chris Long is the VP of Marketing at Go Fish Digital. With 10+ years of SEO experience, Chris works unique problems and advanced search situations to help clients improve organic traffic through a deep understanding of Google's algorithm and web technology. Chris has advised on the search strategies for clients such as GEICO, Adobe & The New York Times. He is a contributor for Moz, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Journal. He is also a speaker at industry conferences such as MozCon, SMX East, BrightonSEO and more.