This article was originally published under Search Engine Land.
What follows is a rant, which is something I rarely, if ever, do. Itโs done in the spirit of fun, so donโt take it too seriously. Enjoy!
I feel like the grandpa who laments in a crotchety voice to his grandkids: โNobody ever writes letters anymore! They just sit on their computers and their cell phones all damn day!โ But instead Iโm saying: โNobody ever blogs anymore! They just tweet and re-tweet!โ. For example, this tweet by @dannysullivan could have been a fantastic blog post. Instead: itโs 129 characters that merely hints at the story:
@dannysullivan: seriously, pinkberry with locations in 2 of 50 states ranks 14 for yogurt? http://bit.ly/dHOYe well @mattcutts does love them ๐
Last week I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Danny on a panel at the eMetrics Summit. The topic, unsurprisingly, was SEO, but targeted to web analytics geeks (a number of whom were SEO newbies). Danny kicked off the session with a quick SEO 101 where he expanded on his gem of a tweet above about Pinkberry.com. Pinkberry is a frozen yogurt brand that I was unaware of until the session. And what a brilliant example it was. Pinkberry.com is a case study in how NOT to build a website. I think they hired the Anti-SEO to ensure they wouldnโt rank for anything other than their brand name.
There was really silly stuff going on. Basic, basic on-page SEO was completely mucked up. Like for example, the page titles. Danny showed the audience site: results in Google for Pinkberry.com and the results were, well, disturbing to say the leastโat least for anyone with an SEO bone in his/her body! Sure enough, every title tag was the same across the site. But wait, it gets better! The titles were all one word long: โPinkberryยฎโ. Luckily, the major engines donโt trip up on circle R and TM symbols, even when they are ASCII characters, or Iโd be complaining about that too! (Nonetheless, I dislike such symbols in title tags. If you must use them in titles or elsewhere or you get yelled at by your legal department, then please โescapeโ them, e.g. ®โitโs just good HTML etiquette.)
Letโs move on to what is on the home page, that most important of pages from an SEO perspective. Itโs a circa late 90โฒs โsplash pageโ. With, you guessed it, zero textual content. This is what the home page looks like from a spiderโs perspective. Pretty sad. Well, to be more technically correct, this is what it sees: thereโs a single image with no alt attribute and a filename that is of no help whatsoever.
Moving on past the content-less splash page, you end up on a page where the mouseover navigation relies on JavaScript, which of course the spiders donโt support. Not only were the mouseover nav items inaccessible, but the main buttons (the ones available without hovering) stopped working. At least the ones that had mouseover effects attached to them. This included their โProductsโ, โAboutโ, โContactโ, and โGroupie Cornerโ. Oh, and again, no textual content to be found. But hey, at least they had defined some meta keywords, so clearly someone at Pinkberry is at the wheel driving their SEO โstrategeryโ (*grin*).
I think the only thing the Anti-SEO didnโt do was take any textual navigation or content elements that may have been remaining in spider-accessible formats/locations and wrapped a Flash movie around all of them. And perhaps added frames for good measure, complete with hidden links in the frameset pointing back to His site.
Yet somehow, despite themselves (as Danny notes in the tweet above) Pinkberry ranks on page 2 in Google for โyogurt!โ Huh? Or as the younger generation like to say: โWTF??โ
Matt Cutts, care to comment? Is this a result of your hand editing since youโre such a raving fan? Or, put another way (by the more politically incorrect SEOs out there like DaveN), a โhand jobโ?
