Recently I stumbled over a holographic website.
It looked like it was there, but it was really just a ghost, or at least thatâs what Google thinks.
As I usually do, I quickly review sites for attendees from my âTune your website for Salesâ? presentations, and on this occasion the business had found they just didnât seem to rank in any searches.
At the time we discussed the popularity of their relatively common business name, and I assumed that it was a typical case of organic competition. What a surprise I got !
The site uses frames, but not for navigation so why would it use frames then? Why woudl you use frames at all ? A quick look at the source revealed all.
The entire site is sitting inside a frame with content sourced from another location altogether.
I tracked the content back to a web hosting organisation providing âsimple web solutionsâ?.
Their content management system allows a client to select and generate a template based website quickly and eaily.
Clearly the generator inserts the siteâs content into the remote domain using a frame.
This makes sense because their clients can easily manage their site without having the technical complexity of deploying the CMS to the remote site location.
The end result works; thereâs presumably an easy to use CMS and the bargain basement pricing makes it attractive, and probably even lets small businesses afford to get into a website.
I was quite happy with their offerings right up to the point their sales pitch suggested the site will rank well in Googleâ¦
Well, to a human visitor the site looks and works just fine; however itâs clearly a different matter entirely for search spiders. Search engine spiders have known issues with frames and that is quite evident here:
· There is no PageRank assigned at all â not even a 0
· There is no evidence of text in the domain â of course it all exists elsewhere â so thereâs no keyword profile
In summary the site is a search disaster.
But just when you don’t think it can get any worse, this poor business owner has a dot com domain, and the site is hosted in the US. They need to get exposure for their site in Australia but google.com.au gives preferences to local Australian sites but not to this oneâ¦
No wonder they don’t rank !
The resolution ?
1. Get a local CMS Thereâs some good cheap ones here in Australia or wherever you happen to be.
2. If you must use a dot com domain then use the Google Webmasters facility to set a geographic preference.
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