Website Over Optimization Pushes into the Darkness of the Invisible Web

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Sante J. Achille

There’s a saying you’ve certainly heard before, especially if you work in an industrial environment that goes:

“If it’s not broke Don’t fix it!”

This piece of popular and very down-to-earth common sense recommendation is especially relevant to the ultra modern and technologically evolved web story I’m about to tell.

Here’s the story.

A few days ago I was approached with a “new job” by my web design partner. He sent me an email: “I was contacted by this agency for a quote to get their website indexed.”
I was travelling on my way home from Bologna where I had been in a conference. WIFI on trains is always a complicated issue but I gave it a try and ran a few of the typical checks.

When non-tech savvy people request a site to be indexed they mean, “we would like to appear in the SERPs for relevant keywords our target audience is using to identify companies such as ours”. After a few minutes I realized they actually meant what they had said – their website wasn’t in any search engine Index.

Incredible – I hadn’t seen anything similar in many years.

There were plenty of healthy looking html links pointing to content rich pages, all hidden in the shade of the invisible web.

Why?

As I’m not a coder most of the scripting of the home page header didn’t mean very much to me so I turned to my friend BrowSEO for an opinion and I nearly couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this …

The mumbo jumbo. Home page text and links were unreadable code.

I sent this screenshot back to webmasters with the question: “what gives here guys??!!” – within minutes they came back and asked me to run the page again and the home page with BrowSEO was looking like this

Quite a difference.

The following day the website was showing up in the Google Index and found its way into Bing as well.

What They Had Done …

Something had gone wrong with the way they applied file compression. I don’t know exactly which technique or how it was applied but the end result is what you see in the first screenshot of this post. So clearly something went wrong with the way they applied it, because if implemented correctly this is not a problem.

Your Takeaway

Do your basics first. Clean up styles and javascripts, test your site for speed, and only then proceed to a further implementation to increase performance. Always test and check what you’re doing. You never know when you’re going to make your next mistake.

About Sante J. Achille

Sante Lives and works in Italy out of L'Aquila a small medieval town close to Rome.

He has an engineering degree, has worked for major aerospace organizations including the European Space Agency (Noordwijk - Netherlands), and has been working on the web since the very beginning of the commercial World Wide Web in 1994.

With over 15 years of hands-on experience, Sante has reviewed and optimized hundreds of websites and successfully cooperated with small local companies and large multinational corporations, offering a wide spectrum of expertise essential to the success of a project. Sante is a seasoned bi-lingual web marketing consultant capable of finding the right solution for you and your company, knowing that one size does not fit all. As a professional search marketer Sante offers consulting services and provides an array of web marketing solutions in organic placement, paid search, and content creation, in both English and Italian.

Sante has spoken at a variety of international conferences such as Search Engine Strategies, RIMC, International Search Summit, Convegno GT (leading SEO conference in Italy), he teaches Web Technology at the Accademia di Belle Arti of L'Aquila, and web Marketing in the framework of the Master in Multimedia Content Design at the University of Florence (Italy), and has recently been appointed Web Marketing Consultant to WE TECH OFF a business incubator supporting the creation of new and innovative enterprises in Emilia Romagna where he is coaching new companies and supporting their efforts in the web marketing arena, and gives seminars on how to build an effective online presence for high tech B2B startups. In 2012 Sante joined the MajesticSEO group as Ambassador to Italy.

Sante has contributed to the book Global Search Engine Marketing by Anne F. Kennedy & Kristjan Mar Hauksson.

Sante regularly participates in conferences, events and debates on Web Marketing, not only in Italy but also internationally and is available to speak at conferences and seminars.

Sante runs a popular blog at blog.achille.name.