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Chapter 3. Eliminating Search Engine Roadblocks

In This Chapter

• Ensuring search engine visibility

• Avoiding problems

• Finding and fixing broken links

• Minimizing code bloat

One way or another, business owners often block search engines from reading their content. And by doing so, they're cutting off a huge segment of their audience. If a search engine can't find your content, it can't index it, which means that it can't determine relevance. When this happens, you don't get ranked.

In this chapter, I cover a range of ways to ensure visibility, find and fix problems, and avoid problems that create search engine roadblocks. I also demonstrate how when a search engine reads your Web site, it does so as the simplest, least-flexible Web browser in the world. In the rest of this chapter, I touch on only a few of the thousands of ways to create search engine roadblocks. If you use a little common sense, though, you can easily test your Web site for problems: Use the Web Developer Toolbar to check your entire site with CSS and JavaScript turned off; fix broken links; and write good, clean, fast-loading code.

Ensuring Search Engine Visibility

I've seen four Web sites in the last year disappear from the Google rankings because a developer put a tagline on every page of the site that read:

meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"

Chances are that the developer put that tag there to prevent search engines from reading the site while she was building it. It's like covering a painting until it's unveiled. ...