In the last year and a half there had been a trend of creating single page websites and navigating within the sections of the page using anchor links and some clever Javascript to add in parallax effects and smooth animated scrolling and although the resulting combined effect of a single page layout with clever use of parallax effects does look nice, it is SEO murder.
When a search engine comes along to your site they’ll see one massive page stuffed with content and not a site comprised of more than one page. While you can write a clever description for your page and use title tags, alt tags and every other trick out of the SEO handbook a search engine will still be indexing just one page: it’s a relatively fruitless effort.
I’ve developed a couple of single page websites and agree they’re not completely useless. A single page site for a marketing site for a single product or sole purpose is an excellent way to engage your visitors, people love gimmicks like parallax backgrounds, bright full-screen background images/colours and flying typography.
The argument people seem to love using whenever the merits of a single page design are debated is that Nike used a single page parallax style layout for their “Better World” campaign and many attribute the rise of the single layout site to Nike. While it’s true they did, Nike are a massive brand with copious amounts of reach, people already know who they are, they aren’t fighting for traffic and attention.
Unless you’re a massive national corporation like Nike, Coke, Pepsi or McDonald’s a single page website isn’t going to do much for you, it could ruin your business if you rely on search engine traffic. The differentiating factor however is if you’re using a single page website to market something super-specific like a product or service then it’s more than fine to have a beautiful single page layout, if you are a mechanic or online clothing store that relies on search engine reach to get new customers, reconsider.
