And they're alway right, are they?
Funny, but I hear this time and time again. "Well, I was looking at a website / brochure / book the other day belonging to XXX company and they're a BIG corporation, so it must be the way to do it".
If I had the time to think about it, I'd probably be able to write an entire book about mistakes made by large corporations. There are so many. Take the Ford Edsel for example. You don't get many corporations larger than Ford Motor Company.
There are lots and lots of stories like that. (Maybe I WILL write a book about it one day).But let's stick o one website story, for the moment. Over the years, I have often mentioned that the search engines WILL BAN websites which cheat to achieve search results. And sometimes, I have thought that people think I'm exaggerating!
But the first instance of this with a site produced by TSDG happened as long ago as 2001.
The owner of the site had been persuaded to pay another company for 'search engine optimization'. The company used illegal methods and were banned from certain search engines. It took TSDG considerable time, and expense for the client, to get the site reinstated.
Why assume that the websites belonging to large organizations are in some way 'superior' to those of smaller businesses?
Another example was BMW's German language site. Google discovered that the BMW site used illegal methods. When a search engine visited the site, it was fed a block of hundreds of keywords focused around, not surprisingly, BMW and 'neuwagen', the German word for 'new vehicle'. Yet when a human user hit that page, some Javascript redirected them to a completely different URL which displays a selection of BMW cars. This is was a well known technique several years ago, aimed at boosting the prominence of a site in Google's search results, but one that is not permitted by the search engines.
The site was banned by Google in February 2006. See the image below. The site was NOT in their index at all.
So, the big corporations get it right, do they?
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