I am constantly receiving contact emails from people seeking help with their search engine rankings and when I tell you I have seen just about every nightmare imaginable I am understating but this past week I saw one of the most horrific things ever.

A very nice lady emailed me about her permanent cosmetics site, I get a lot of these because my client Theresa Judd dominates the search engines for just about every permanent cosmetic term you can image, but I digress. This lady had used one of these ‘free’ website builders and the entire site is done using Flash. I told her about the problems search engines had with Flash and ranking well. She promptly went back to the company that these sites ran under and mentioned what I had said. They emailed her back and very nicely told her they had ‘forgotten’ to turn on the SEO features on her site but they were now working properly.

I was curious what these SEO features were so I went back and looked at her site. While nothing looked different at first glance when I looked at her source code I saw it. What this company’s so-called SEO features were all the sites content on the page, hidden from view.

Now anyone that knows anything about SEO knows hiding text from the viewer so only search engines can see it is a major no-no and will get a site banned from Google (as well as the others) in a heart beat. All one of this ladies competitors has to do is email Google and tell them what she is doing and she will delisted and banned. Getting ‘unbanned’ is a living nightmare so effectively her web presence could be gone for months, possibly years.

So if you are looking for a website and think free might be a great deal, think twice, look ‘under the hood’ of some the other sites that have been built with the software and make sure free doesn’t get you into hot water.

till next time,

Dave

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