Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

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Is your Accessibility policy damaging your listings?

Last week yet again I found myself reviewing another poor sole's web site who had no Google ranking, no cached pages and no PR beyond the home page. On the face of it the site was well written, Google had obviously been there as the home page was a PR4. It had link structures with html pages and no obvious reason for its failure to rank.

Accessibility is normally a very good idea when it comes to web site construction. The fact that the principles behind accessibility, not only help humans to read and understand a web site but the same applies to search engine spiders as well. So how can your accessibility compliance damage your ranking in search engines?

Normally it wouldn't, but we are seeing more and more occasions where the statement "a little knowledge is dangerous" is very true. Site owners are being lead to believe that true compliance cannot be achieved with the main site, so a text version, reproducing the entire site in text is produced. Good idea I hear you say... not exactly!

We know that Google, Yahoo and MSN not only write in their do's and don'ts to avoid page duplication, but recently they have become almost dictatorial in the way they treat page or site duplication. They are all on a charge to clean up their indexes, getting rid of web spam. One of the biggest issues they find are pages constructed with very similar content just with a few keyword changes, otherwise known as gateways. The problem is that to a search engine spider a text only page of an existing page looks like a gateway.

I should say that if managed correctly there is no problem with a developer creating text only pages, as long as search engine spiders are excluded from reading them.

In fairness this problem is simple enough to fix- using a nofollow tag on the site pages HREF's and a noindex in the robots text to exclude the duplicated pages from indexation.

M.P