Noframes with SE friendly text
In the good old days when frames still were considered the state of the art, it was not unusual to use NOFRAMES so that those with browsers that didn’t handle frames could have an alternative text to see.
Some bright heads found out that this also could be used to manipulate the search engines by showing the users something else than the search engines.
Search engines are still indexing text inside NOFRAMES (see below). That is probably why we find search engine food hidden in NOFRAMES today. Let me show you one example from the site Smedbo.no.
This is how the users see the homepage:
This is the text in the NOFRAMES, which is indexed in Google et al.
November 29, 2007 at 7:28 am
Even though we all know why the text is there, it is still relevant. And it does even provide relevant informastion for a user not using a frame-enabled browser.
You may even say that the text is optimized for a blind user not beeing able to scan through the page for keywords.
If I search for «bathroom accessories» and get this site as a result it makes a perfectly valid one. The ethics is questionable, but I would not consider this outright spam. I’m not sure if it actually breakes any of Google’s guidelines, though.
November 29, 2007 at 7:54 am
Bjørn: I see your point, and it is not always easy to draw the line. In the example I find the discrepancy too big to call it help for the blind. One may put a lot of relevant text in areas that are hidden from the normal users, but I doubt the search engines’ webspam teams like it. This is not the way to get high rankings. Also: Have a look at the way Smedbo has used keywords: H2, bold, italic and grouped together at the bottom.
Anyone here believe this is written for the blind or browsers that does not handle frames? See here:
“With SMEDBO you can choose among many different lines of towel hooks.
We offer a variety of styles in bathroom hooks, from traditional towel hooks to contemporary bathroom hooks, to suit any decorating taste and design in bathroom hooks. All of our towel hooks are made of the highest quality solid brass with special blacksmith attention paid to all bathroom and towel hooks.”
Bathroom hooks, towel hooks, bathroom hooks, towel hooks - I think the guy who wrote this knew what he was doing.
Writing good, SE friendly content with the right keywords is not wrong. Hiding it is IMHO wrong.
December 2, 2007 at 1:09 am
I would agree with the above. I have seen on the other hand sites which rank well because they simply got anchor links to point to their site, but their entire site itself is simply pictures and they don’t bother to create ALT text descriptions for their pictures or any text at all. All of us… pointing fingers at myself can improve our own websites. Sometimes I wonder at times if over tweaking a site offsets simply creating great content. I know that that over 50% of internet data being uploaded is video content, but not everyone for example can enjoy the audio due to having some issue for hearing for many reasons, ranging from an issue with the person themselves , environment or computer hardware. I have made some experiments with creating valid subtitle texts for videos posted on video.google and reaped additional attention. It just takes extra work.
Regards,
Dexter
December 3, 2007 at 9:11 pm
This method is quite common in Sweden, especially for some SEO-firms. If the customer don’t have frames, fix it and have a 1px frame at the top so you can optimize a noframe-tag.
In most of the cases there are also SE-friendly links back to the SEO-firm in the noframes-tag.
If you have time you will find out that there are a lot of dirty SEO-methods in Sweden.
January 22, 2008 at 6:42 am
And we also see a lot of imaginative use of the noscript tag. Often without an association to any javascripts.
What we need to remember is that none of these techniques works too well in themselves. They need to backed up by an extensive link campaign. It was long since Google would rank sites by anchor text alone in my opinion. These techniques needs to be backed up by buying links, using link farms and catalogue admissions to be effective.
After that, sadly, the technique seems to work quite well in Google. But only, and this is important, for a limited set of terms, never for the vast set of search phrases that an onsite optimized site gets through it’s longtail text material.