Forum Moderators: coopster
#1 - The main page of the website will have 10 articles, a sidebar menu to other tools including an archive page. Each article on the main page will have a snippet of text from the first sentence or two, the rest of the article is hidden WITHOUT a "read more" type link. The title is the link to the article and good use of .css coding makes that obvious.
so far so good for SEO and user friendliness alike.
#2 - When an 11th article is added it goes to the top of the main page. The last article on the main page falls off into an archive.
Once in the archive the snippet of text is also removed from the article link leaving only the title as a link to the article.
Again none of the articles have a "visit archives" type link in them, there is a single archive link in a sidebar menu. This promotes fresh content which is good for crawlers and visitors alike. so far there are zero redundant links and no "next page" type of links so... Next step.
#3 - The archives hold 75 links (article titles) per page right now, i can change that number now if I wish so im not concerned about it. Although on the main page the most recent article is up top, in the archives I opted to reverse the flow so that the article links get added to the bottom of the list, when 75 fill one page a new page is created. Unlike on the main page the archives DO have pagination at the bottom of each page. It's of the numbered variety like here on webmasterworld. Since the flow is reversed though the pagination for page "3" (example) will always have the same 75 links to the same 75 articles.
The benefit is that the page will remain the same forever, each link wont ever get bumped to a new page (new uri), or new pagination number.
I have all of this working flawlessly but realise I have just one more step to code... or perhaps not code depending on the concensus here and after a weekend of thought.
Its two part. A) should I add a link to the archive at the bottom of every article page (the full article pages) or should I leave that link out as well, it would be redundant since its in a sidebar menu.... kinda. or...
b) should I revise the "archive" link altogether because right now it invariably goes to page one of the archives... and there may in time be 100's of archive pages. Right now the archive pagination will show as "www.sitename.com/archives/page1" then "page2" etc...
I looked at sites like yahoo or google for answers but find none, those sites have the main page articles fall off the site completely (not even into an archive apparently, I couldn't find a link to one on the main page or article pages).
My goal is to make it easy for spiders to find all articles quickly, a search feature will make it easier for visitors... but I need SOME kind of link at the bottom of each article for visitors, i can't expect them to backpage to get back to the main site or to dig through the archives pagination. Adding pagination to each article that matches the archive seems like the only choice but then as i mentioned... google and yahoo dont do it.
I can leave each article with no links at the bottom, the sidebar is static and thus on every page. Crawlers wont mind and visitors backpage anyway.
or
I can add a link in each article that looks something like "this article is stored on page "x" of the archives" and use pagination.
or
I can go with the "back to archives" type link at the bottom of every article, the drawback being they would be sent to page one of the archives every time.
or... other options in this layout?
thoughts?
Probably links of "Related articles from our archives" and probably listing something relevant to the subject matter, or date, or anything incommon. That way the pages will be linked one another, which I think is good for search engines.
Hab
#1 - The main page of the website will have 10 articles, a sidebar menu to other tools including an archive page. Each article on the main page will have a snippet of text from the first sentence or two, the rest of the article is hidden WITHOUT a "read more" type link. The title is the link to the article and good use of .css coding makes that obvious.so far so good for SEO and user friendliness alike.
I don't think this will be as search engine friendly as you think - by hiding the content on the main page (albeit with CSS) you are essentially cloaking content. You will also cause a duplicate content issue as the articles on the main page will be repeated again on the individual article pages. I would go with having the first paragraph as a taster and then link through to the completed article.
With regard to your pagination issue, I would definitely go with the second option i.e. having a link back from each article to the page in the archive which contains the article in question - this makes it easier for a user to get back to the page they were on originally without having to use the back button (if I understand your setup correctly).
If you settle for a link back to the first page of the article a user will have to go through each article page which will soon get tiresome if you have a lot of pages and/or no other method of navigating through the articles.
Having additional links to similar articles as suggested by Habtom is a really good idea for SEO and user satisfaction.
HTH
