how not to SEO (search engine optimize) your landing page
Wed, 2007-11-28 05:22.
»
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™ </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">
<p>This site requires Flash Player 9. Please upgrade <a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">here</a>.</p>
</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>
Comments
I'm not surprised. Their billboards are incredibly lame too. I've been seeing them for months, but never actually cared enough to look it up when I got home. I hate billboards that tell me nothing about what's being advertised.