Many site owners have no idea, when they approach a search engine optimisation consultant, that their site is not friendly to search engines. Although you may suspect that your site isn’t exactly successful, and may realise that your ranking could use a lot of work, you might not realise that your site is actively putting search engines off.

It can be hard to spot these kinds of things when you’re close to a site. A helpful exercise is to envision the opposite of what you need. Picture the most search engine-unfriendly site possible. What would it contain?

Unfriendly technologies

The technologies on your site can have a huge impact on your relationship with the search engines.

• Built entirely in Flash. Although Google has been making moves toward reading Flash content properly, and indeed has announced that some Flash content is fine, sites are still experiencing problems with this technology. Most SEO experts still cringe when facing a site full of Flash, as it just makes things harder.
• URLs containing ‘?’, numbers and other symbols. A site full of dynamic URLs will be hard for search engine spiders to crawl. A friendly URL will contain understandable words, and SEO companies try to insert keywords where possible. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about friendly URLs.
• Frames. The search engines have been struggling with frames for many years. Although the ’solution’ has frequently been announced, they still hamper SEO.

Fancy design

You might not consider that the way your site looks can affect how the search engines crawl it. What many site owners don’t know is that aspects of their design can block search engine spiders and hide information.

• Doorway pages. These can be seen as spam, as many sites have used them to boost the site’s keyword density. As a consequence, they can get you kicked off the index. They also annoy users.
• All menus in JavaScript. If you want the search engines never to crawl beyond your home page, then hiding all of your navigation within menu technologies that the search engines can’t read is a brilliant idea. If, however, you want a number of pages on your site to be crawled, make sure you have your navigation in a text-based format as well.

A navigational maze

SEO experts commonly believe that search engine spiders will take the easiest paths and not go too deep into your website. An over-complicated navigational system on a site can prevent pages from being indexed.

• One kind of navigation only. Search engine spiders are fickle creatures. You can’t count on them to make too much of an effort to crawl your pages. The answer, then, is to make things easy for them and provide several types of navigation. An unfriendly site will place its only form of navigation in a hard-to-read format.
• Pages within pages within pages. Putting pages too deep within a site is one way to ensure they are never crawled. Well-designed navigation can take care of this.

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