Infinite scroll for e-shops based on CS-Cart and how it affects on SEO

The infinite scroll is a trend not only of social nets but of the online shops too.

If you use CS-Cart platform for the e-commerce business, you are about to know how to use a lazy load pagination on the website and not to harm to SEO. Traditional pagination fades into history as more and more people use smartphones. It is a challenge to click the small number button with a finger on the smartphone screen during a store navigation. The customers can quit the online shop after some unsuccessful attempts. The user-friendly website navigation method, like a lazy load, will improve the CS-Cart shop usability and helps you not to lose the clients. But, you should be very careful, the automatically per-page navigation modules can bring you a headache with SEO issues. 

First of all, the infinite scrolling can’t be used everywhere on the e-store. Sometimes the traditional per-page navigation is preferable on separate online shop's zones as customers may have an ability to reach the footer easily. As usual, there is an important contact information in the footer. Try to give the store visitors more convenience browsing your store. Remember, search engines track user behavior data. Such things like long session duration, regularity of visits, CTR and etc. effect on SEO, raise the store's visibility and bring you more profit.

The infinite scrolling is better to use for the product categories and on blog zone. These zones usually contain a great amount of context with images.  As it is easy for customers to scrolling images, a lazy load is a plus in such cases.

Automatic uploading pagination doesn't always have a positive impact on SEO.

There are two main SEO problems connected with the infinite scrolling in CS-Cart:

• The products can be indexed too long. It can be impossible to find them through the “organic” search.

• The search engines give penalties for the content duplication, that may take place on the endless pages.

Indexing problem using infinite scrolling method.

Google spiders are not humans and they can not wait for a new portion of context uploading. Also, there is a time limit for each Google crawler visit the website, so they are supposed to index only the text and images they find faster. It is a real craw obstacle if the URLs don’t change during the scrolling process.

The best variant to achieve the proper CS-Cart store indexation by crawlers is to display different URLs for every viewed page on load by scrolling down.

Content Duplication on automatic pagination.

Same URLs, same meta information, and similar content may cause a penalty from the search engines. But if you use different URLs, canonical links, 301 redirects and detailed robots.txt where you type the instructions for crawlers, you will ensure the visibility of the CS-Cart store and its content on search engine results pages.

CS-Cart platform has great opportunities to SEO.

• There is an ability to define global SEO rules for URLs rewriting in the store.

• The simple form to redirect store visitors and Google robots from the old, non-actual page to the new one.

• Moreover, CS-Cart has a convenient way to edit the robots.txt file in a shopping cart admin panel. It's not all SEO features of CS-Cart.

• It has an ability to change page meta information via Design-> Layouts -> click on the gear icon on the Default tab.

• The shopping cart system has a SEO tab on product editing page in the admin area where the store administrator can enter page title, meta description and check Google Rich Snippets for certain product automatically in the backend.

Several years ago, Alt-team developers created the additional CS-Cart module "Easy Scroll Pagination". The popularity and demand of this add-on were explained by the trend in e-shop design developing. From the very beginning, we paid lots of attention to SEO recommendations of the most popular search engines.

At the moment, "Easy Scroll Pagination" add-on:

• changes the URLs during the scrolling down,

• keep URLs registered in browser history and

• during the scrolling down, a shop visitor can click on any link, look through the opened context and return to the certain page, he left. It positively effects on user behavior as it allows to relieve the clients from the necessity to scroll down the already viewed pages.

Moreover, this CS-Cart module for lazy load pagination was tested by many happy customers and most of their reviews are on official CS-Cart forums. 

Conclusion.

 If the CS-Cart infinite scroll pagination is developed due to all SEO recommendations, you will have no problems with ranking in search engine results pages. Moreover, the website visitors will visit your store using their smartphones as it is convenient to use infinite scrolling on portable devices.