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Re: MSc Research - Does making a Website Accessible compromise Search Engine Optimisation?

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From: Karl Groves
Date: Nov 18, 2009 4:40AM

Richard,

One thing to be cautious of, when processing the results of your survey, is
that while your respondents may certainly be well informed on the topic of
accessibility they may not actually be qualified to speak on the topic of
SEO. I think that there are a lot of rather outdated opinions out there
among the web accessibility community regarding the SEO benefits of an
accessible site. There was a time when I could put up a site that was
"search engine friendly" and I would dominate my target keywords in a matter
of weeks. As the internet has grown and as Google PageRank has become
more important in the ranking of results, having a "search engine friendly"
website is really a secondary (or even tertiary) concern.

At the risk of getting people on this list up in arms, I'd say that if one's
sole goal was SEO/ SEM, their time & effort would be best spent on keyword
density and inbound links. The objective-proof-in-the-pudding on this
would be to perform an A/B test using identical content. Spend x amount of
hours ensuring the site is accessible for one version and spend that same
amount of hours generating high quality inbound links[1]. I would argue
that organic traffic from Google will be higher on the version where your
time was spent on building inbound links - and that the payoff for this
level of effort will be immediate. The Google patent itself will back me up
here.

1 - There is one caveat to this: If a site is produced in a way that puts up
barriers to search bots, then there will be obvious tangible benefits to
accessibility. I once did a site fix on a client's site that broke every
rule in the book. It was frames-based. It had a flash-based menu bar across
the top and a JavaScript "fly-out" menu on the left. They also had scores of
articles that were actually scans of articles written about them in
magazines. I took the site out of frames, fixed the navigation, added a site
map, got their content into actual HTML and made all the other sensible SEO
changes you can think of. When I started with that client, they had an Alexa
ranking of 1,450,000+. They went to just under 450,000 in under 3 months.
As well, on Google, Yahoo, and MSN searches previous to the changes made,
their website was ranked on the 3rd+ page. Now they are on the top 10 for
all of their target keywords and are often in the top 3.



Karl


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