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63 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
63 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: SEO & iframes
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permalink: /v5/seo/
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---
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Since Coral is embedded in an article page using an iframe, we often get asked what affect,
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if any, iframes have on a publisher’s SEO. We asked Hart Van Santvoord, Vox Media’s resident
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SEO expert to give us some insight to help answer these questions.
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We can confidently say that today's modern crawlers are able to crawl and index content in
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iframes and that they do their best to associate the two and identify which version is preferred.
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This isn’t as relevant however for content that is complementary to an article, such as comments
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here in Coral’s case, or with other embedded content like documents or live blogs. It’s is more
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important for products or people who are iframing entire pages, such as for syndication.
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[Here's commentary on that from John Mueller of Google, probably the most trusted
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Google technical SEO resource we have.](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-iframes-seo-24098.html )
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When newsrooms and organizations come to us with SEO questions, it usually falls into
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2 use cases.
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1. We need our comments to be indexed to help our SEO!
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For this case, we are very confident that the way Coral is currently handling comments
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via iframe provides the SEO benefit publishers are looking for:
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* Google can crawl it and associate it with the container article/page
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* They're certainly seeing commenting activity as a positive sign of engagement which
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Google cares about A LOT
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* Ongoing commenting also indicates to google that the page is evolving/updating,
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another strong signal
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* Serving via iframe typically improves performance as opposed to including the content
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directly on the parent page, and faster/better speed and UX is yet another strong positive
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signal to Google
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For an example of how the Vox Media SEO team has analyzed iframe content outside of Coral,
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we can can look The Verge. The Verge leverages live blogging for certain types of events,
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[such as iPhone events](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20840715/apple-iphone-11-event-live-blog-announcement-photos).
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In this case, similar to Coral, the live blog content itself is embedded on The Verge article
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via iframe but no doubt leads to a more engaged audience who stick around longer, refreshes,
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clicks load more, etc. We see these articles perform well in search in a super competitive
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space on event days.
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That brings us to our 2nd use case:
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2. Please, make sure my comments are NOT indexed!
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In this request, the use case is slightly more complicated due to the fact we know
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Google can crawl and index comment content. But, given that Coral does not also
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create creating a page just with the comments, we don’t see a chance Google would
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Surface just comment content in search results outside of the article in which they’re
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embedded.
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If you’re a publisher in this scenario and are worried about the content in comments
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reflecting poorly on your site/brand then this seems to be as much as moderation issue
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As a Google one, and again, Coral does not provide a way for Google to crawl, index,
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and serve up commenting content outside the context of the article regardless.
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If you are a newsroom doing creative things with your comments and perhaps would
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Have the need to create a separate page with only comments, then you can certainly explore
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Using tools like a canonical tag to redirect that page back to the container page, and other
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SEO best practices for this and other edge cases.
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