Search Unfriendly JavaScript Navigation Kills Robots & Spiders

Randy at Frederick Realty requested my free SEO help file today.

A quick look at his website shows a Google PageRank of 1 out of 10 and a site: search at Google shows only three pages in the index. Why? No sitemap I can find, no xml sitemap either, and a cute little JavaScript fly out navigation menu that is totally search engine unfriendly.

If you look at the navigation code in the home page, there are no URLs in the script. Rather, the script calls for sub menus which are not page file names. So, when the spiders and robots crawl the page content, there are no hyperlinks for them to read and they go bye bye without having anything to eat content wise. The problem is compounded by a requirement for selecting navigation sources three wide. My guess is, if we could look at stats for this web, this web doesn't get crawled much any more.

A good html or php sitemap will help, but why intentionally penalize yourself by making your pages unfriendly for the sake of a cute little menu? You can accomplish similar fly out menus using plain text and CSS. Go look at www.kokodaspirit.com, one of my Australian web clients. The fly out menus you see there are all done with CSS and one itty bitty script that helps make the functionality work for both IE and Mozilla.

This website has other significant opportunities for improvement. More content on the pages I looked at, page specific targeting with title and tags determined from search phrase research, a robots text file, registration with Google and Yahoo Site Explorer. There is ample hope for resurrecting this website but if the crawl frequency is low, it may take a while for improvements to kick in.

There is an important lesson here. IF the web designer would have done a crawl as soon as this website went online it would have been immediately apparent that visiting spiders and robots were going to starve to death.

If you can't get crawled you can't get rankings. Spiders eat bugs except on the Internet. In the case of this website, the bugs are killing the spiders.

MLM Cookie Cutter Website and Duplicate Content

Patti in South Carolina sent me a question today: I have a premade website from a company I work for. It is an MLM organization, and the website isn't able to be edited. I can't download an html or meta-tag. How can I submit it to the major search engines if I can't edit it?

Patti, I have looked at a number of MLM cookie cutter websites and have seldom seen any that make it into the Google index. These websites are typically duplicate content, which Google says they do not like, and most of them are in a directory within the main company web, which is the case with your website.

A quick look at the robots.txt file for the domain shows disallow statements for a number of MLM partners or distributors, meaning that the MLM company is preventing these directories from being crawled by spiders and robots. Your directory is not in the robots.txt file at the moment.

You can submit your directory to Google and the other search engines, Patti, but I doubt seriously if this will do you any good. The best bet, if you want to use the Internet to promote your products, is either pay-per-click advertising or create your own unique website and do it your way.

In my youth I was involved in several MLM "opportunities" from Amway on up. They all sounded great. The guys and girls at the top who helped with the initial network creation all made a lot of money. I made a little money on one, broke even on one, and still have products in storage somewhere that all have expired born on dates :-( MLM is the best method I have ever discovered to alienate your family and friends. If you want to run them off, try to sign them up. It's a great tool for chilling out your mother in law.

Cheers,

Ron Castle

FatFighterTV Earns # 1 Google Ranking

Sahar at FatFighterTV.com sent me the kind of email I like to see this morning:

"I'm #1 on Google! Thanks for your help, Ron! I hope to add more SEO pages soon! Talk to you soon."

The new content page target is "fun healthy delicious food" and the page is in the FatFighterTV blog. I helped Sahar with research, editing and analysis, she wrote the copy.

Before we did any SEO work, Sahar and I spent a lot of time to get her thinking cap pointed in the right direction about a unique selling proposition for her website. Her plan for generating revenue is through paid advertising which means she has to have a lot of relevant traffic. Her online videos are interesting and informative but not much help for organic search.

Continuing top notch content development is her plan. Hopefully it all turns out like this new page. A good website is never finished.

Cheers,

Ron Castle