» February 20, 2008 in
Collin from FeedFlare.ca asked if your template or theme could affect your seo? It was an interesting question I don't usually see so I thought I would try and answer.
Disclaimer: You can hurt your seo by trying to make your blog seo friendly (like changing your url structure without redirects) and I'm no expert, so take the video and advice with a grain of salt and modify at your own risk.
YES, your template can help or hurt your seo.
Get Your Content High
When you hit view->source in your browser your content should be as high as possible in the source code.1. Many people believe that, all things equal, that a page with the content at the top of the source will rank higher than one with content at the bottom of the source.
2. By placing your content very low you increase your odds of forgetting to close a tag like a script or href tag and have a bot parse out some of your content.
Spiders Are Your Friend
Lynx is a program that tries to spider your website like a googlebot or other search bot does it. Try your site at this lynx viewer for fun.Sites that have crazy templates, open tags, or other nonsense can make lynx viewers choke, like FeedFlare.ca was doing when I tried it.
This is real bad because google guidelines say your site should be able to be viewed by a lynx viewer.
Slow And Low
A poorly coded template can slow down your site. Not only from the obvious large picture files, but from poor design choices like putting the CSS and Javascript in the template instead of keeping them separate.
Assuming speed of the site is an seo ranking factor, your designer can hurt you with their design decisions. Here is Yahoo telling you to separate your css and javascript to increase speed.
"Link"in Logs
Back at the google guidelines they tell us pages should have less than 100 links.
Certainly you won't get booted for having more than 100, however it could probably be thought that all things equal, a site with a few hundred links will rank less than one with one below 100 and in compliance with the webmaster guidelines.
Some designers will add 30 links of archives, 20 links of recent comments, and all other kinds of nonsense. You might be over your 100 link limit with just your template links if the designer gets carried away.
Finally
You are much better served spending your time worrying about content instead of worrying about seo. HOWEVER, if you were setting up your blog tomorrow, you might want to take some of these thoughts into consideration when picking your next template.
Can you think of any other problems a template can cause with your site ranking?
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Feed Flare says on February 20, 2008
Hey Mark, great job explaining things. I have recieved a new theme tonight from UBD that I will be usein with in the next week.
Very good post forsure.
Thanks again for clearing that up.
Lori says on February 21, 2008
WOW! That sure makes you think. I just looked at mine and I'm embarrassed to say that I had to scroll waaaay down! Geez, maybe I should check out some of the SEO themes at Tuttle's place. She has a good list.
Feed Flare says on February 21, 2008
If you really want to laugh, go look at John Chows code. It is worse then mine.
Oh and Mark, I just reviewed my site with Google Webmasters tools and everything looks 100% according to everything they have to me to check it with. Only 3 errors of pages not found because they have been removed.
So I am not sure what that Lynx thing is. Also there was a widget in my sidebar that had some links in it that was loading very slow, I pulled it and I am about 2 times faster now, well at least to me. My pics are very big tho.
45n5 says on February 21, 2008
thanks for the comments ;)
remember it's not that big of deal if your site has a few seo booboos
"You are much better served spending your time worrying about content instead of worrying about seo."
"You can hurt your seo by trying to make your blog seo friendly (like changing your url structure without redirects) and I'm no expert"
Elliott says on February 21, 2008
Mark, great tips and advice.
One key thing to check is the validation of both the html and css of your theme. This has saved me countless hours trying to figure out why something wasn't working right, or loading slowly.
Validation should be the number 1 ingredient to a well coded them. The Lynx viewer is a neat tool also, there is a firefox plugin for it as well.
Vlad () says on February 21, 2008:
Nice post mark. I am going back and forth between the "number of links" on the page. Huge number of links might be necessary to help your readers navigate your blog/website. I am not trying to argue with Google's webmaster guidelines- in fact I have given up arguing against Google few months ago.... :)But in respect to the links I think one should be concerned more about balancing outgoing links with the links pointing to your own pages.
However I am no SEO expert, so do not take my advise seriously :)
Tom Beaton says on February 21, 2008
If you link to css and js files you would keep the head nice and short.
a right hand side sidebar with all links,navigation and ads in should make the content come right up near the top of the source code.
Vlad () says on February 21, 2008:
Ok Mark here is another question. It is related to SYAH...We serve the ads with javasctipt right? So according to what you have said in the article we can have an external file for our ads??? It's little confusing for me.
I did notice that with all 7 ad zone on my blog the page load is much slower. It would be great if you can put a tutorial on how to separate js from your template.
Scott says on February 21, 2008
Great post Mark. I ran my new site through Lynx and came up with 116 links. Most of them are coming from the social bookmarking widget I am using at the end of each post. So I will be knocking down the number of those that I use.
Thanks again!
Chris says on February 21, 2008
Yeah, that FeedFlare.ca site is just bad bad bad markup. As Yahoo states...link to your javascript files and link to your css files. Inlining them is fine if you're on an intranet, but not if you're doing SEO. Wow..i'm still amazed that FeedFlare.ca did that....sorry..lemme take my mouth off the floor.
45n5 () says on February 21, 2008:
@vlad - javascript widgets aren't what they are talking about, they mean the actual javascript that does the heavy lifting.having bunches of javascripts at the top of you page might slow it down regardless of where they are served from
@chris - great ebay site ;)
@scott- welcome to the party!
Sean Conner says on February 22, 2008
If you are using Firefox, you don't even need the Lynx viewer, just go to the menu and select “View → Page Style → No Style” and you'll see the page as a web crawler does (more or less).
Carsten Cumbrowski says on March 1, 2008
Hey Mark,
If the content higher up in the code will improve your ranking is not 100% proven, but Google does weigh importance of content based on proximity and location of the content on a page (as good as they can, probably within sections of a page, unless they are able to understand CSS now, which allows to move content on the page around as you see fit.
There are other reasons why you should move CSS and JS code to external files (in addition to improving load time) and use CSS to be able to have your boiler plate navigation and content that is located at the top and left of the page to the bottom of the HTML source code. You should also use CSS to reduce the ratio of HTML code to Content for faster load time and the reason that I am providing now.
Google might not parse the entire HTML of a page that is too long. If your content is at the end of a big ass HTML document, Google might never gets to know about it, because their spider never gets to it. This will not just reduce your ranking, but not rank your site at all for phrases that are part of the not indexed content.
Having more than 100 links on a page is not such a big deal. Google and other SE usually discount boiler plate links on a page, which could be quite a few for some sites. What can happen though is that after some 100+ links, Google decides not to count them (pass on PageRank or link juice) or might not even get followed and added to the crawler queue.
I never heard of a case where Google misinterpreted a site that has many links on some of its pages as a free for all link spam page and penalized it as a result, but hey, if almost all your pages are filled with hundreds of links, Google might concludes that your site is in fact nothing else than a link farm (which wouldn't be too far off the truth in such instances actually hehe).
Regarding the ranking factors. Here is a quick reference for the 50+ most significant ranking factors in an easy to digest and check format.
Cheers!
Carsten
Carsten Cumbrowski says on March 1, 2008
Oops, here is the link
http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/seo_ranking_factors2007_quickref.asp
Sapphire says on March 2, 2008
I'm puzzling over the links thing, too. One of my sites has a lot of categories and tags because my visitors requested that structure for organizing the type of info this site presents.
I don't know if this is hurting me in the SERPs or not. The site does fine, but it plateaued a few months ago and can't seem to move onto the next level. Still, if the SEs can't grasp the difference between internal linking for navigation and link-farming, to hell with them. My visitors come first. ;)
Craig says on March 3, 2008
SEO Themes - Does Your Template Help or Hurt Your SEO - Mark over at 45n5.com talks to us on how your blog theme may actually hurt your SEO.
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