Saw this article pop up and figured i’d share since I know I can benefit from improved SEO when building with Bubble:
It was an interesting read because @bryce.murray shares solutions to the three problems he identified and also offers to help others.
Has anyone here used these tricks before? Any others worth sharing here?
I’m glad this was helpful!
For example, I get www.myapp.com/clothing_stores/in/new_york/brooklyn
and on that page will have a map populated with clothing stores in Brooklyn New York. I also use that data from the URL to set up my Page Title, Page Description, Image and Structured data.
To overcome the page load speed issue, whenever you are navigating the user to the same page, but changing some URL values (path lists or parameters), which ultimately change data on page or view of elements on page, you want to use the go to page navigation action, which as stated in the article can be done by making almost any element clickable. And as pointed out, if you do navigate internally with go to page actions, the SEO benefit of links is not attained.
So, what I do to make use of best of both worlds, is I put the links I want to have search bots aware of, into a repeating group that is inside of a floating group which is set to float beneath the page and basically ‘invisible’ to the users eye, but the search bots pick up all the links in the repeating group. Then, I use a button, group or text to trigger the go to page actions for user navigation. With this approach I get the SEO benefits from links as well as the UX benefit of go to page navigation action.
I’ve been requesting from Bubble for some time, as I’m sure numerous others have, to increase the power of the go to page action and I believe they may be doing so in the near future.
One thing, I do hope Bubble does is to enable more use of path list items in this approach as URL parameters are not as beneficial to SEO as path items are.
Most of the tricks I use I mentioned such as using a path list to hold data relevant to keyword searches. I also ensure the headers of text elements are used properly and have an H1 that would read something like ‘804 Clothing Stores in Brooklyn New York’, and the names of the stores in the search card would have H2 on the name of the store, so my SEO would have multiple header tags.
Also, in my page data, like title, description as well as Header where I place my structured data, I make use of “conditionals” through the use of the :formatted as text operator to essentially create an ability to change those values dynamically, especially on a single page that shows both the search results and the selected result, so the page URL could be one of either:
A. www.myapp.com/clothing_stores/in/new_york/brooklyn
B. www.myapp.com/clothing_stores/bennies_beanies
Mostly, this is there for the user to see the values properly while browsing, but I also have another page, that users can not navigate to, but I use the link for search bots to ensure when they crawl they index the page with proper data…the other page would be something like
www.myapp.com/clothing_store_listing/bennies_beanies
This is because the time it takes for the page details to change dynamically is a bit too slow for search bots to always pick up the correct content. So, the other, user non-navigable page, has the page content type set to clothing store, and I just supply the slug of the store listing, so the page details are picked up by search bots as well as social media sites.
I’m currently deep into my own personal project, which is a multi-language app, so I’ve found myself getting creative for the SEO and URL manipulation.
I’d be careful with a few of these tricks. You may be getting flagged for having non-visible links. Google tends to not like invisible things and it may actually be having a negative impact on your SEO.
Moreover, the canonical links quote → “I never see them show up in my SEO checkers”. What do you mean they’re not showing up? Which link checkers are you using.
GSC is showing the canonical links and Google isn’t serving multiple links to the same page (i.e. http://www.twostory.com and https://www.twostory.com)
Thanks @bryce.murray
In terms of canonical links I use a free chrome extension called SEO Meta 1 Click, and in it, a snap shot shows canonical and it is always empty for my sites when I use the canonical feature of Bubble
The screen shot above is from Bubble forum…for my sites, it is always empty even if I put the canonical URL feature in place within the app.
I just checked these out. When I use the link without the ‘s’ from http:it is automatically changed to https:; I can see the canonical there, although both URLs are the same. Leads me to believe maybe I need to send a Bug Report to Bubble about the feature not working properly in my apps, as well as take a closer look at the manual to see if I’m doing something wrong.
I have seen this before, and thought that if I didn’t make them invisible, by actually hiding the elements (ie: make not visible by unchecking ‘visible on page load’), but instead just put them into a floating group, that is floating beneath the page, and therefore on the page and theoretically visible (because if the page background color is none, the floating group set to float beneath the page would be visible to the eye), that Google search bots would not consider them invisible.
Do you know how if it is possible to check if Google were to consider something as invisible and whether or not it is getting flagged?
