SEO Skeptic

How's that for a potboiler SEO headline?  It's nowhere near as egregious as it sounds, and I doubt whether anyone at the search engines would really claim that what the BBC is doing is "cloaking" in the malicious sense of the word, but technically speaking … well you be the judge.

I was looking at the BBC home page because I found a pointer to it as example of a <table>-less layout (which I favour for SEO purposes, and the code is magnificent).  So I turned my styles off to see how it looked.  After that I did a bit more investigation and this is what I found.

See the "cloaking"?   The <h3> phrase "Weather for London" doesn't appear anywhere in the user view, nor do thewords "Conditions" or "Temperature."

There's perfectly valid accessibility arguments here, but nonetheless it violates what I consider Google's "rule" regarding CSS rendering of image-rendered textual elements (or of any textual elements):  the code should match exactly what the user sees, without changing any words or - especially - adding them.

This relates back to a post on Dave Naylor's blog I saw a year or so ago where there was a discussion of using CSS replacement techniques  for image-presented text.  Matt Cutts responded there, giving his thumbs-up to a comment added by "My line has always been: if you OCR the page, there should be the same text as when you read the source."

Again, the BBC is hardly guilty of black hat keyword stuffing here.  But there are several small instances on this page of small words being added (another example, the code has "World Regions" appearing at the bottom links section, right underneath "News" … not so for the user).  But the "Temperature" addition is interesting.  How many ecomm webmasters would like to text-render "Widget Store" as "Online Widget Store," for example?  And how would Google react to that being uncovered versus the same sort of behaviour on the BBC home page?  One wonders.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Cloaking, Image Replacement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.