Jekyll Page vs Post - which is best for SEO?

robbertl · April 26, 2021, 10:05am

Hi All,

Based on peoples experience and knowledge, which is considered ‘better’ for longer term SEO coming from Jekyll, especially with Google, Pages or Posts?

My reason for asking is that I am using a Jekyll theme (Desk - Responsive Knowledge Base & FAQ Jekyll Theme Preview - ThemeForest) that does not have / provide sub-pages navigation in the main/top of page menu i.e. under FAQ, FAQ for Customers, FAQ for Business, under Services , Services clients, Services business users, etc. that type thing.

I think it is a very nice, clean, simple theme, the main reason for use, and I don’t want to start ‘messing’ around with it (too much) so that the original asthetic is lost. I am not even sure if adding sub-pages would ‘look/feel’ nice in the theme, sorry for rambling on a bit here…

I have content that that is static, which would normally fit as a sub-page under a ‘main’ navigation the contents of which will not really change overtime, but I would like the page / post where the content is based to be as SEO friendly as is possible.

Realistically my options are:

a) to put the content on pages, pages that do not show up in the main navigation or as sub-pages on the main naviation or on the home page, but are linked to on main navigation / ‘homepage’ pages so that users can click through to them:

or

b) to put the content in posts that do appear on the ‘homepage’

Does anybody have any comments, advice or words of wisdom as to what might be the best option to use to maximise potential for listing on Google - particularly as a sub-listing under the main page listing as with Jekyll Talk - sub listing: Help, Announce, etc.

I know that relevant content, well written prose and a genuine focus on the topic (without keyword stuffiing) is very important, but do people think that pages or posts have a better chance of achieving this, and would pages not listed in the main navigation / top of page have any chance of achieving this either?

Any ideas, comments or feedback welcome.

Thanks

MichaelCurrin · April 26, 2021, 2:17pm

Hi. I don’t think Google cares whether your page is a plain page or a post page. Its just HTML.

And you can use the sitemap plugin to generate a sitemap file that lists all your pages. Whether posts or pages.

I would decide what makes sense for your viewers and what the typical blog structure is.

A blog post in Jekyll must have a date and usually all posts are in a flat structure by being in posts directory.

These are typically available a list of all posts, on the homepage or a /blog/ page. If you have a lot, then you can implementing paging (e.g. page 1 of 15 with 10 or whatever posts on a page).
The number of posts can continue to grow so they don’t work well for a navbar.

While you would have pages not related to dates exist as plain pages (not posts). Available in your navbar, which fits well as they don’t grow over time like blog posts do.

Navbar help

Rather than forcing non-blog posts in a blog structure, learn how to adding a navbar to your site to access your pages. Whether you list the pages by name, or find them automatically and show alphabetically

None of the standard GH Pages Jekyll themes came with navbars as far I could tell. However I was able to repurpose some other buttons on the theme and make my own navbar. Check out my blog repo here

In particular the navbar in this file

github.com

MichaelCurrin/coding-blog/blob/master/_includes/header.html

{% comment %}
    Based on midnight theme
{% endcomment %}
<div id="header">
    {%- assign default_paths = site.pages | map: "path" -%}
    {%- assign page_paths = site.header_pages | default: default_paths -%}

    <nav>
        {% assign index = site.pages | where: "path", "index.md" | first %}

        <!-- The fork button class from midnight is aligned to the left so use it here as a hack. -->
        <li class="site-title fork">
            <a href="{{ index.url | relative_url }}">{{ index.title }}</a>
        </li>

        <li class="title">
            <a href="{{ site.github.owner_url }}">GitHub</a>
        </li>

        {%- for path in page_paths -%}

This file has been truncated. show original

You can add a header.html or nav.html file to your repo to override or extend the theme you are using, without having to duplicate the rest of theme files. In my case I also made a footer.html and layout files but I could have left those out.

I would recommend you look at this repo for another angle on making a navbar.

I linked to the 10 step tutorial on the Jekyll site too, so you can build a site from scratch and learn how to make a navbar yourself. The tutorial doesn’t use a theme but the knowledge is transferable. A theme means you have includes files, layouts, assets etc. which are installed behind the scenes but are still Jekyll files.

Post tags

If you have a good case for using posts…

To make navigating posts easier, you can have a page of all tags, or categories. In this case I also show the post snippets under the tag name.

MichaelCurrin · April 26, 2021, 2:28pm

If you do go for posts, I would also research how to use HTML that helps browsers and crawlers see them as posts.

And to see authors as on your site as authors and music albums as albums etc. That is the semantic web.

This might help when Google presents search results as you tell google what is an article page and what is a post page.

Here is my layout, borrowed from a Minima

github.com

MichaelCurrin/coding-blog/blob/master/_layouts/post.html

---
layout: default
---
{% comment %} Based on minima {% endcomment %}



<article class="post h-entry" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/BlogPosting">

    <header class="post-header">
        <h1 id="{{ page.title | slugify }}" class="post-title p-name" itemprop="name headline">
            <a href="#{{ page.title | slugify }}">{{ page.title | escape }}</a>
        </h1>

        <p class="post-meta">
            <i>{{ page.description | markdownify }}</i>

            <div>
                <span>
                    <b>Posted on:</b>

This file has been truncated. show original

It links to

https://schema.org/BlogPosting

Which I think tells the crawler how to interpret things, if it matches then rules.

I think the classes used are just for styling.

But the time and datetime bits are probably meaningful for crawlers.

I wouldn’t get to obsessed with this though. Write good content as pages and as posts that humans like and that browsers like and can load quickly. Use html5 bits like article and section tags etc. as well.

And once you have your content visible online, then you can tweak the SEO relevant stuff I mentioned on Schema to get your ranking higher or at least give people more relevant results for their searches (which in turn gives better ranking).

Oh and yes you’re right. Not only does keyword stuffing not working, but google said a few years back that they actually ignore the keywords metadata and rather use repeat use of terms throughout the text of the page.

MichaelCurrin · April 26, 2021, 2:32pm

In terms of navbar layout

This is a Docsify site of mine but you might like the navigation.

You can click the items on the top as pages. Some are dropdown menus of more pages.

And then there’s a menu on the left for jumping between sections on a page but it can also be configured to be the main nav. With no navbar at the top then

https://michaelcurrin.github.io/python-twitter-guide/#/

robbertl · April 26, 2021, 2:50pm

Hi All,

Wow… thanks for the feedback and suggestions.

Some very good and advice and options.

Every answer I read shows me how little I know and how far I have to go. Even reading and digesting some of the content and links will take a while.

I really appeciate all of the time an effort taken in posting replies and sharing your expertise.

Very much appreciated.

Thanks

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Jekyll Page vs Post - which is best for SEO?

Navbar help

Post tags

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