Have you ever seen nikebetterworld.com? If not, go over there, check it out and come back.
That single page design, that scrolls in new content, is known as the parallax effects and it is done using jQuery. It looks hot and it is not using Flash, so it is even hotter.
But it horrid for SEO purposes.
I spotted a Google Webmaster Help thread where a site was not necessarily using this effect but placing all their content on a single page, and navigating to that content using anchor techniques. You can see this site at 23cornwallroad.com - it is a pretty site. But like I said before, for SEO purposes, it is not great.
Yea sure, you can try to optimize a single page for a bunch of keywords but you will have a heck of an easier time optimizing many pages for specific keyword phrases, as opposed to targeting all your keyword phrases on a single page.
Google's JohnMu explained:
I'd generally recommend a more traditional site format. It's complicated for search engines to understand a "one-page" site like that, given that there is so much information on a single page. It's much easier for our algorithms to focus on individual pages with content that matches the same context. Additionally, as Becky mentioned (thanks!), it could be extremely confusing to the user to see basically an empty page when they expect to find content based on a search that they've made.
So if someone lands on this page, they are not immediately taken to the section (the scroll/anchor position) via a search engine. So they land on the blank logo section and are very confused.
What do you think?
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
