Is your website blocking Google? Or, to be more specific, is your website have so many images or animation on it, that they are getting in the way of Google's ability to crawl through the text on your website? Now, here is the problem. Google needs real text, real text links to crawl through to the next page.
So, for instance, on this website, in this paragraph, it's all plain text, but there are no links in here. The typical blue underlined links that you would see that would link down to a sub-page. And that's a problem for Google, especially on this website. Google does need the link text.
Now, buttons that are linked, images and photos that are linked, animation that is linked to sub-pages, they do not work. Google cannot crawl through those images to get to the rest of your site. Thereby, making the rest of your site, technically invisible to Google. So, when someone searches for a product or a service that might exist on a sub-page of your website, Google doesn't even have that page in its database.
So, it will never show up in a search and you just won't get found. And that's the problem. Now, how does this work? Let's just give you an example of button text. Here is a button that says kiosks. And here is a button and a link that says compact power. Now, one of the ways you can figure out whether your website is blocking Google is to actually try to highlight the text.
Click down and hold, and then drag your mouse cursor across the text and see if you can highlight it. And if you can't, it is probably a button, as this is right here. Now if you right click, trick number two, and you get a little pop-up. If you see something that says flash, that means it is a movie. It's actually a piece of animation. And Google can't read animation. It doesn't know what to do with it and it doesn't crawl through it.
Now, another way to do it is, let's take a look at another image that's linked here, contact image. If we right click again, that is using the right button on your mouse, you get another pop-up. And if you see something that says, "Save image as," that tells you that that's an image. And even though it is linked, Google can't crawl through it.
Now, in this particular site, this text here, if you did a really, went fancy and you did a source view, you could go to view source up in your browser, and search for the words that are in this text right here, you won't find them, because this text was actually animation generated by flash. And it is invisible to Google.
So, to sum it up, if you are not getting found in Google, it could be that you have a heavy dose of imagery or animation on your website. And it's literally blocking Google's ability to get through your text and also to get through to the sub pages on your website, which makes them invisible. It makes the text invisible; it makes the pages invisible to Google.
And today, with the technology available, you can accomplish beautiful, graphic-rich sites, that are transparent to Google, that are loaded with link text so Google can easily crawl through and get all of your pages into it's database.
And that is the first and one of the most important steps to getting your website found in Google. And today, Google is the primary search mechanism in the world to find a business like yours.
And if your website is important to you, you might want to consider biting the bullet, and rebuilding it, so that it's friendly to Google. Use these open source platforms like Droople, Junela or WordPress. They are free, they are infinitely customizable, and they come with templates, and they are great.
Now, I would like to sign off with a little thought provoking question. Is your website building your business? And that's it for today.
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