T2i – Infinity (Photo credit: @Doug88888)
I belong to a technical SEO community on Google Plus, and today, someone asked a question about infinite scroll. I’m sure you’ve seen it. You don’t have to use pagination to get you through, you just keep scrolling down and get more and more content from the site or blog.
In theory, this sounds like it might be a cool thing. I don’t know about you, but I hate more clicking than I have to do, and infinite scroll certainly takes this off the table. OK, that’s a good thing.
But… Did you know that it can hurt your SEO?
Infinite scroll has to be done properly or spiders can’t crawl your page properly. It involves java-script coding or Ajax, and I for one, have no clue about either language. I’m guessing that with WordPress, where you have the option of allowing infinite scroll, it’s done well, but there are other reasons to avoid it.
One is that if you have a footer with information you want people to be able to see, such as your contact info, links to other places on the site, your disclaimers, privacy policy, and FAQs, infinite scroll can make your footer really hard to get to. So, instead of making things easier for customers, you’re actually making it harder.
The other reason is that infinite scroll can take up a lot of browser memory. If you have a site with text only pages, it’s probably not an issue. But if you have videos, lots of images on one page, or any other reasons why it takes one or several pages to load slowly, infinite scroll can just lock a browser up. And yes, remember some of your customers are still using sucky browsers. If this happens more than once on your site, they’ll probably not come back.
I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s not an option. Instead of improving customer experience, it can go toward making it more frustrating. Why take the chance when it’s really not that important?
