3 replies to this topic

[kassim]

Hi...I have a simple idea that I think is too easy to be of any success but I thought the Etomite developers and users may be able to advise me on this. Before I begin let me state the obvious - Etomite is the best CMS out there!

OK, I was wondering that if I were to deliver an alternative search engine friendly layout to search engines such as Google would:

1: Google find out?
2: If they did would this be seen as sneaky resulting in a ban of the domain in Google's database?

I am not talking about creating specific content for Google but just delivering a different minimal design layout.

Thanking you all in advance!

P.S. Sorry if this post is in the wrong forum

[mikef]

answer to 2 is 'probably'

Remember though that in general search engines aren't interested in layout, and ignore CSS.

[Jeroen]

I don't realy understand what you want to do here... The whole purpose of a good design is that it's content gets separated from the layout.
Example: If you look at my own site, I even managed that the main content div is one of the very first in the HTML document. Next are the sidebars and footer... And there are many more legal and good things you can do to make it easier for search engines to generate good keywords and ratings for your page. If you trying to force google into something, then you will get in trouble.

If you're able to give google an extra template without having to enter every thing twice, then I think you've done a good job at separating content from layout! If you use valid and modern mark up, then I realy don't see the problem.

[kassim]

Jeroen, on Jan 8 2006, 08:15 PM, said:

I don't realy understand what you want to do here...

The site is a traditional table based layout with plenty of spacer gifs. Content is way further down with regards to the code and all the headings, navigation come before it. A nightmare to visually replicate into a css design. It would have been a very nice quick fix just to deliver a different layout by identifying Googlebot using the user-agent. I know css designs will reduce file size, save bandwidth, is seo friendly and is the way forward but this is a complex design to replicate. With IE not being fully css compliant (and I am not a fan of IE but am forced to test my designs on this platform as well as other browsers) this would be a time consuming, bug fixing task which then produces non-compliant css. I hope that makes more sense but thanks for your input.