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Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed.

Some examples:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linkin...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-single-...

The comment to justify why the question is closed is always the same: "This question appears to be off-topic because it is about SEO".



"how can you get the most SEO results out of a one page website"

"Is there any way to dynamic generate content without affecting search engine indexing and ranking"

"Is there anything I can do to make google crawl my website"

"Is it safe to pre-load 4 website into one page without search engines interpreting it as misleading"

If you are a programmer who do not work at google, it is impossible to answer. If a co-worker gave me any of those questions, I would answer it by giving them the link to google's recommendation page about SEO, while warning that google is a private company that do not disclose their methods in indexing website. I can guess and speculate how they think or what their intention are, but any advice would only reflect how I think it works today, and google may at any time change how they index websites.


Irony alert: StackOverflows has amazing SEO.

And I consider Google+SO the best programming tool ever created.

wrt Closed Questions, simple heuristic - if the page has lots of visits, lots of upvotes and is high in google for common searches do not close the topic. Clearly there exists a market for this question for many people, even if it boggles super-users' sensibilities.


For your information, the Google specification [1] is implemented in google, bing, msnbot, yandex, pinterest and mail.ru bots. Making the solution compatible with the other bots is a matter of adding 2 lines in the server configuration.

[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...


Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3905734/how-to-send-100-0...

FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo


> Questions that imply you're looking for better ways to spam also tend to fair poorly; can't imagine why.

I do not follow you.

> FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo

I know that Webmasters SE is supposedly the right place to ask questions about crawling issues and Ajax, but in fact you will find more questions on SO (see links below) because this is mainly related to technical issues with JavaScript.

234 questions tagged http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newe...

74 questions tagged http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo+aja...


Maybe I'm just off-base, but I'd consider all of those off-topic for SO. It's not a programming or programming tools question, it's a "how does Googlebot work?" question.

The knowledge would certainly be useful to many people, but it is outside of SO's scope as it is defined.


Don't you think that implementing the Google crawling scheme [1] (i.e. returning a snapshot of an Ajax application) is a programming or programming tools question?

[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...

(edit: typo)


I'm surprised these questions aren't marked too broad instead as off-topic.




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