Are You Keeping Secrets From The Search Engines?
Many webmasters are obfuscating the content of their sites’ pages from view of the search engines. They post content that appears differently for human readers than it does for search engine crawlers. And as a result, their sites receive inferior treatment from those search engines in the indexes. No, I’m not talking about page spam […]
Many webmasters are obfuscating the content of their sites’ pages from view of the search engines. They post content that appears differently for human readers than it does for search engine crawlers. And as a result, their sites receive inferior treatment from those search engines in the indexes.
No, I’m not talking about page spam (that’s a topic for future discussion). I am talking about non-text-based content. So many websites invest in pretty web design with little-to-no thought on whether or not the search engine crawlers can access and interpret the meaning of that pretty content. This is really about down-level strategies, aka graceful degradation, for search.
If your site is super-basic, lots of text, with otherwise no images, videos, JavaScript, or rich Internet application (RIA) technology such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, the search crawlers will love it. Mind you, I’m not saying it’ll give it preference in the indexes. (Your site still needs great content and authoritative backlinks, among other things, for that.)
If anything, today’s search engines are looking at things like quality page design and presentation as best they technically can for inherent end user value. But text-based sites have one great trick up their sleeves: the search crawlers can easily access and interpret all of the content they offer.
If the crawlers find great content throughout the site, along with relevant keywords used in body text and reflected in key HTML tags, such as
, establishing relevance for the content their pages contain is straightforward.
But what about the pretty pages, the ones filled with either binary content files that are hard, if not impossible, for search crawlers to reliably consume or those that have content buried in