Sites with Parallax

[Laustin1878]

Has anyone worked with or built sites with parallax? For example: Themify Demos

I'm wondering what the SEO involvement is like. I personally have not worked with it but I'm starting to see several sites with this type of scrolling design. Basically, there is 1 background image that the site scrolls over. As you scroll, it stays as one page but the main nav links change as if you are changing pages, pretty much like page anchors.

With several sections/pages rolled into one, I'm wondering how the hell you SEO it? lol

 

[Linda Buquet]

Wow! Impressive looking.

SEO? No clue how it would work!

 

[Laustin1878]

They are really nice looking. It got me thinking:
- can you optimize the main background image?
- can you embed a map?
- how do you optimize for different pages when it's all contained in 1 page?

Those are my initial thoughts. It just looks like a lot but differentiating pages and targeting multiple search words for each page doesn't seem possible on these types of sites. I have no clue what the backend options are but they have me really intrigued.

 

[Rich Owings]

Here are several approaches outlined: Parallax Scrolling Websites and SEO - A Collection of Solutions and Examples

 

[Laustin1878]

I was just reading that Rich...lol thanks.

 

[Digitaldar]

I learned quite a bit from Moz.com before building my current site. I've learned a few things along the way that I will translate into super simple terms

• your navigation should lead to clean pages, not anchors on an existing page
• if you have a parallax site and you scroll down and see services, the content you are seeing here may be lighter/different than the content you would see when clicking on the services page - it might be teaser content to encourage you to click in to the services page
• modern Wordpress themes make two tier navigation difficult!
• specifically, if you have a service page and then build sub-pages, the services page becomes unclickable! (argh!). The answer is to not have two tiered navigation but you can have sub-pages. From my services page I would link to my sub-pages but the sub-pages would not be found in the main navigation. Creating sub-pages allows you to have a URL naming convention such as site.com/services/serviceA

Anyone else have takeaways after reading the above article?

DigitalDar

 

[steven]

Looks really slick, but I wonder about the page speed with all those images...

 

[Laustin1878]

That is one of the larger downsides with these types of sites. Also, mobile compatibility as a result of longer page load times due to being so image heavy.

They key with these sites seems to be a hybrid design. Have the homepage parallax and the internal pages static offers a good blend which will help with the SEO side of things.

There are some really cool sites out there using this design element, Apple being one of them. (their new Mac Pro I believe).

Has anyone actually worked with one of these sites? I'm curious if any of the SEO issues highlighted in the previously posted articles have been corrected in some way.

 

[steven]

Yep, the mobile side of this sounds like it would require a dedicated mobile site, not only for the page load speed, but for UX. Sorry, I don't have any experience with parallax enough to help out to answer any of your questions...

 

[Howell]

Parallax sites....I avoid like the plague.

They are beautiful but many don't convert traffic very well...at least the ones I've measured. Mostly because of the endless scrolling to find the actual content.

 

[Laustin1878]

Howell, have you experienced a site using parallax with a hybrid design? The work around with getting better data is to use parallax on the homepage and static pages internally.

My initial thoughts were optimizing images. I have to imagine that you should have no problem on this front with such a design.

I started this topic to open up a discussion about them. I'm sure there will be more people coming across them so I figured why not open up the forum here. Hope you don't mind Linda ;-)

 

[heckler]

Cutts has a few comments on it:
[video=youtube;Mibrj2bOFCU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mibrj2bOFCU[/video]