Marfeel understands the value of SEO. Maximizing exposure and acquiring new readers is key to the longevity and continued success of any publication.  

That's why Marfeel's crawling algorithms and platform are engineered to boost this vital element of customers' online presence. It's also why the practices and methods explained below are employed - which have also contributed to Marfeel's ability to increase traffic by 5x or boost traffic levels by 89% for some publishers.

Unique URLs for mobile and desktop

Maintaining one URL when you have two different formats of the same content is extremely important. If a desktop and mobile version of a publication have separate URLs, they could be treated as two different entities.

Marfeel's JavaScript activation code is devised to detect when a reader is using a supported device and stop loading the desktop version in the background without creating a new URL (m. sites). This behavior ensures that all share counters are aggregated against one unique URL and avoids any redirection. 

It also guarantees minimum loading times avoiding a second DNS resolution and a whole server roundtrip.

The Marfeel Garda code cannot be added via Google Tag Manager. It needs to be inline to guarantee it's the first thing that executes so Marfeel loads as fast as possible.

Adding the Garda code through Tag Manager would introduce a visual flicker between the partner's solution and their Marfeel version.

 

Critical render path and loading speed

Marfeel content can be fully rendered with JavaScript disabled. An article's HTML delivered by Marfeel contains all the semantic HTML required to render the critical path without any extra server side requests. 

The main goal of this is to allow Google to crawl the Marfeel mobile site as fast as it can. Marfeel normally boosts crawling stats on the Google Search Console by reducing the KB downloaded per day, the page download time, and the overall increase in the amount of pages crawled a day.

Canonical URLs

When we crawl a publisher's original website and process their HTML, we duplicate and transform the HTML textual files which we then distribute from our CDN infrastructure.

To bolster SEO, Marfeel is completely transparent with Google - while contents are physically duplicated, we instrument Google not to crawl them from an SEO perspective with a canonical <meta> pointing to the original URL.

Consolidated meta tags

We know the time and resources that are invested in SEO from an editorial perspective and that editors spend a lot of their valuable energy meticulously picking and tweaking the title of an article, its most relevant keywords, etc. Normally all these aspects are captured in Google supported meta tags that are embedded on the canonical article HTML.

These meta tags are fully respected by the Marfeel crawler and kept on the mobile version to allow a consistent SEO strategy and positioning.