Helping visitors see their content when it's below the fold

[superclown2]

I have lost count of the times when people have visited a page via a search engine, having put in a search term that is highly relevant to a subject that is well covered within that site, but who have bounced straight out because that subject matter is below the fold or needs a click upon a link to display the correct page. Is there a way, I wonder, of analysing the search term that they have typed in via a script on the webpage and then displaying the exact page, or part of page, that most closely relates to that search term? And (perhaps more importantly) how would G view this I wonder? If we could crack this I'm sure that our conversions would leap many times over and G would presumably be happier because the client had found relevant content.

[tedster]

I use such a script on an ecommerce site that uses show/hide divs to make lots of product information available with one page load. The script makes the correct div visible if it's not already visible in the default page load, and then highlights the search terms that were grabbed from the referer information.

We don't use javascript to scroll the page when the first occurence of the search terms are below the fold, although technically that could also be done. And Google loves this site - no problems whatsoever.

[Jon_King]

I think I must be a bit slow not to have used it... that dynamic div tip will be really useful. Thanks Tedster.

[superclown2]

"I use such a script on an ecommerce site that uses show/hide divs to make lots of product information available with one page load"

Wow. Can you be more specific? Is this script commercially available?

[tedster]

Sorry, the script was custom written for this specific site's needs. But it only took a javascript coder a couple of hours to cook up. What what I wrote basically lays out the logic in pseudo code. Just look at the referer. If it's google, then grab the search terms and look through the page's content for the first occurrence. If the CSS for that div is display:hide or display:none, then change that rule to make it visible.

[jomaxx]

Tres cool idea (WebmasterWorld does something similar, by highlighting search terms for Google referrals). But what about all the OTHER people who would benefit from whatever information is lost below the fold? If it's such a big issue, maybe a general cleanup and redesign is in order.

And if the wrong page is being indexed, that's another issue altogether.

[superclown2]

"If it's such a big issue, maybe a general cleanup and redesign is in order. "

Surfers are looking for precise search terms and they are impatient - who can blame them. If a search engine just leads them to a webpage they are left to search through that page to find exactly what they want but in most cases if it's not immediately visible they'll bounce out and try somewhere else. This is not good for us, it is not good for the search engine. IMO we need to have some way of presenting exactly what they are looking for, right in front of them.

[tedster]

This discussion prompted me to take a closer look at how Google is treeating the site where I've used this scripted solution. At a time when many sites are seeing url after url slide into Google's supplemental index, this site shows only 1% of its urls in supplemental. That's probably the best ratio of any site I work with, and the home page is only a PR4.

Now there are probably other supportive factors involved, especially the site architecture. But certainly there's not a problem created by this script.

[superclown2]

"This discussion prompted me to take a closer look at how Google is treeating the site where I've used this scripted solution"

Would the effects of your script be visible to a search engine? Presumably G would just spider the site in the normal way, with the script as a separate entity (and presumably with the permissions not set to readable)?

[tedster]

I made the comment because the main Google-related question the opening post asks is "how would G view this I wonder?". Don't forget that Google does take javascripts and analyze them, and they do penalize for some uses of javascript - so the answer is not a foregone conclusion.

Using such a script allows a lot of content to be placed on one url in a user-frieendly fashion - and I prefered to use show/hide divs rather than scrolling beyond 4 or 5 windows full. We considered informational pop-ups or iframes, but both those approaches made the CMS we'd committed to quite problematic to use, so we decided that show/hide divs was the way to go.

When the -950 penalty first popped up, and as I began to suspect that high co-occurrence levels might trigger that problem, I did get concerned about how Google's algo might see this site. After all, many of these products have thousands of words on one url - that might boost co-occurrence.

But instead of content length being a problem, it looks like this is an asset. It certainly was created to be an asset for the user, but you know you can never be sure with an automated algorithm. Perhaps the co-occurrence tolerance is weighted by total word count in some way.