steveroberts
15-01-2010, 06:28
Not sure where I should post this (Indizine..feel free to pm me where it should go).
A friend has asked me the following:
His web site is a contract cleaning site and a key word he is interested in is cleaners in sheffield. The home page is populated with the key word but when he looks at the Google cache, Google does not seem to see the key words, cleaners sheffield.
He's asked me to have a look at it (as an enthusiastc amateur!!!); but for the life of me I cannot figure it out :huh:
http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:i4_kezRwS4IJ:www.cleaners-in-sheffield.co.uk/+CLEANERS+IN+sHEFFIELD&cd=17&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a
Anybody got any thoughts on it?
indizine
15-01-2010, 08:38
It might be to do with the crawl date or something but whatever, he doesn't need to worry about that because a browser can read it as far as SEO is concerned.
He does however, need to add that keyword into his meta description. He could also do with removing uncessary words in his meta tags, for one example, the only word that needs to be in his title tag is 'cleaners in sheffield ' - and nothing else, not even the name of the business.
I couldn't install it myself despite it being an original copy so I've never really used the adobe connect in great details before but I am aware of what it does.
It could be that the adobe connect software is interferring with it or google doesn't want to touch code that has adobe connect reference in it. It makes sense if you understood what adobe connect does.
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:ice="http://ns.adobe.com/incontextediting">
If you change the above to simply <html> see what it does but you might have to wait for it to recache it to see if it was that.
anywebsite
15-01-2010, 11:56
it's because they've used <span> tags around all the text. for the highlighting to work, google puts <span> tags around the highlighted words, but it wont touch it if they're already in <span> tags.
its just the highlighting thats broken because of that, it'll still index all the keywords on their pages.
I've looked at it again and found this: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006062.html
They have white text ("Caring For Your Business Environment") on white background which may cause google to think that they are hiding text and probably cause the page to go supplemental which causes the highlights not to work.
See http://www.seobook.com/archives/001545.shtml on what is supplemental.
If you run it through http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ these kind of mistakes get picked up on.
See the warnings:
19 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts body and h1
34 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts body and h2
163 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts body and #menu ul li a
176 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts body and #menu ul li a#active
176 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts body and #menu ul li a#active:hover
377 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts #header and #main #middle #right .box .boxright1 div p
indizine
15-01-2010, 12:52
Google will also penalise a site that uses white on white etc which is effectively a black hat seo technique to hide words on the page from humans.
anywebsite
15-01-2010, 12:53
I don't think it is a supplemental result & that small amount of white text on an image background wont affect anything anyway, although it is very hard to read, i didnt see it at all the first time i looked. The homepage doesnt appear to be a supplemental result at least.
It's not actually a white background, it's got a gradient image behind it. Google penalises sites for loading the page full of invisible keywords, not for a few words that are a bit hard to read.
I'm pretty sure its just an html/css problem, the html code clashes with the way google highlights keywords on cached pages.
However, the site is nowhere to be seen in google for those keywords, so there's a lot of work to be done as far as seo goes.
There was a go daddy incident a few years back which proves Google never actually supplemental the home page as a last resort but that doesn't mean it doesn't at least get flagged as one.
This problem needs to be dealt with anyway whether that it a side effect of text highlighting not working is anyone guess.
steveroberts
15-01-2010, 15:00
Hey everyone...this is greatly appreciated, thank you.