How not to SEO (search engine optimize) your landing page

A while ago gThing noticed that Utah’s latest pyramid scheme MLM opportunity, GoYin, had an unintentionally comical — and not very search engine friendly — website.

Well, it looks like they’ve outdone themselves. Their website now sports no real text at all — not even in meta tags. And they top it all off with a really annoying flash based splash page.

Somehow, in just over a thousand characters, they managed to earn zero SEO points, work in an Internet Explorer CSS hack, fail XHTML validation, make their site completely inaccessible to anyone with a screen reader, and annoy the crap out of me. Great job, guys.

For your perusing pleasure:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>GoYin&amp;trade; </title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="javascripts/swfobject.js"></script>
<style type="text/css">
    /* hide from ie on mac */
    html {
        height: 100%;
        overflow: hidden;
    }
    
    #flashcontent {
        height: 100%;
    }
    /* end hide */

    body {
        height: 100%;
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        background-color: #EAECEC;
    }
</style>

</head>
<center>
<body>
    <div id="flashcontent">
        This site requires Flash Player 9. Please upgrade <a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">here</a>.

    </div>

    
    <script type="text/javascript">
       var    so = new SWFObject("swfs/preloader_main.swf", "Goyin", "800", "600", "9", "#EAECEC");
        so.addParam("scale", "noscale");
        so.write("flashcontent");
    </script>
    
</body>
</center>
</html>