I'm going to have to link to the web site to explain this, http://www.diagram.ly, it's a free service, so I hope this doesn't break advertising rules.

Basically, it's a one page web application, I don't want to create a web site for it. Some background text loads and if JavaScript is enabled, the web application itself then loads.

The problem is that Google only seems to be picking up the title of the page and the text on the footer, so the site only appear on Google search for very limited text (based on the title and meta description mostly).

I was hoping that search engines would pick up on the background text and index that. The text is factual, not keyword stuffed. Yahoo seems to pick up the text, just not Google.

Does anyone have any experience of how Google would view such a site and where I could put the text for a better result?

Edit I should mention that Google Webmaster Tools lists the site keywords as "Component, diagramly, feed, mxgraph, share and twitter". Basically the footer and little else.

  • What makes you think Google isn't picking up the defaul text? Showing the page title and meta description in the SERPs is normal and not an indication that the page content is being ignored. – John Conde Mar 18 '11 at 14:29
  • @John Conde, unless you search for exactly the title "Draw Diagrams Online", I've never seen the site listed after 30 pages of Google listings. There are some reasonably ranked pages linking in, I would have thought, say, "diagram online" would come in the top 300. – David Mar 18 '11 at 14:31
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    A one page website is at a huge disadvantage. You have no internal links and I'm guessing few incoming links. Your site probably just ranks poorly. Your best bet is to get some incoming links and create a website for that app with multiple pages and internal linking. – John Conde Mar 18 '11 at 15:18

Like your app, very cool. I do not know that there is much you can do to get a one page web application to rank highly in Google, but Google should be seeing the paragraphs of text that are in the HTML of the page.

For higher ranking I recommend writing an about page that serves marketing purposes, an in-depth about page that covers the technical side of things, and as many help pages as you can muster. One help page for each key word or phrase that include links to external resources and back to the application should make a real difference in your Google rankings.


One part of the ranking algorithm that Google uses is the number of pages on the site. Sites that are only one or two pages are harder to get ranked. I recommend you add a few more pages to the app. Maybe a how to page. Be sure that these pages are linked to from the html (not inserted by javascript).

Also, how many backlinks do you have to this page? You will need to get backlinks, especially on a one page site. When you get backlinks, use the anchor text of the backlink for keywords that you want to rank for.

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    Can you cite a source for "One part of the ranking algorithm that Google uses is the number of pages on the site." I certainly have seen nothing to indicate that. When you think about it, it doesn't make sense. How does number of pages affect relevance or quality? Even worse, that only encourages webmasters to create lots of worthless content in order to increase their rankings. That's exactly what Google doesn't want and is cracking down on. I'd have to chalk this one up to myth. – John Conde Mar 18 '11 at 17:19
  • I'm afraid I doubt the statement that fewer pages works against you. An example I can think of is a google search for "javascript libraries", top link is a single page with a list of links to the libraries. I think a single page focuses the keywords on it more sharply to search engines. +1 for keywords on the anchor of the backlinks though, good idea. – David Mar 18 '11 at 20:07

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