Common Search Engine Problems

When I'm marketing Newfangled by making introductory phone calls to advertising agencies and design firms, I usually try to Google the agency's website before calling. If you're one of these agencies, you should know that a good percentage of the time I do not find a site, even when I am looking for it by the agency's exact name. You might want to check this out for yourself. If you are one of those agencies that do not show up in search engines, here are a few reasons why this might be happening:

Flash - One of the reasons that many agency sites don't show up in search engines is that many agency sites are built in Flash. Flash is a wonderful technology, allowing for merging of animation, sound, and other interactive elements. There is no question that Flash based sites can be more dynamic than non-Flash sites. However, one major limitation of a Flash based site is that Flash is not read or indexed by search engines. There are a few techniques that if implemented properly can mitigate some of these problems, but even when intentionally addressed, the bulk of the site content will not be indexed by search engines. Without implementing these techniques, a search engine will see absolutely nothing to index, therefore your relevance ranking will be non-existent.

Splash pages - Another factor is the high percentage of agency sites that use introductory splash pages. I've referred to the newsletter "Splash is Dead" a few times already. You might want to review it and decide whether or not the impact of a splash screen is worth losing up to 25% of your visitors and losing the most heavily weighted content pages of your site - you default home page (index page). If you do use a splash screen, you absolutely must make sure that your "skip inrto" link is not a part of a Flash animation. Search engines don't see Flash links and so they will never get past the splash screen and therefore none of your site's content will be seen or indexed.

Resizing browser windows through JavaScript - Another related problem common to agency websites it the technique of making the index page automatically re-launch a new browser where you control the exact size of the window through JavaScript. Because this technique is terribly abused by certain disreputable sites, most search engines do not follow JavaScript links that pop up new windows. If you use this technique, you are probably keeping search engines out of your website.

Overuse of graphic text - Lastly, one of the reasons many agency sites do not do well in search engines is the over use of graphical text. While this is usually to be expected for navigation graphics, and even page titles, to use graphic text for main body copy, which is usually done to more fully control typography, keeps search engines from reading and indexing the content.


As we've alluded, next month we will describe a NewfangledCMS application that will help maximize and demonstrate your search engine activity throughout a NewfangledCMS site. We'll also provide a few tips on how you can choose effective key words and phrases for search engine positioning.