WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Can SEO and Accessibility coexist?

for

From: Stephanie Sullivan
Date: Jan 21, 2005 12:21PM

On 1/21/05 12:55 PM, "mmoore" simply typed the following:

> The problem is that SEO specialists are attempting to manipulate the
> search engines rather than allowing them to do their jobs. As to the
> use of alts to manipulate search engines - the search engine designers
> will soon discover this ploy and will ignore keywords in alts just as
> they do in the meta-data. As SEO's continue to discover new ways to
> manipulate the search engines we all suffer. Our searches return less
> useful results and we are encouraged to compromise our principles and
> make pages less accessible and usable but more "attractive" to spiders.

I completely agree with your entire post and it is my thinking as well. BUT
-- in many cases, the client doesn't care that we're being ethical. They
want to be at the top of the search results... :-| It's the "everybodies'
doing it" thing... If what the SEOs are doing to manipulate is working, then
I have clients that want to be manipulated, you know? It's the old, "if you
can't fight 'em, join 'em" thing... And they hire SEO people that come in
and tell me what should happen, or do it themselves.

That said, I have seen a case where a client (I did NOT build or design his
current site) has a fully graphical site. Even the text is a graphic. He
used alt attributes to rewrite ALL the text that's in the graphics so it
would be picked up... He thought. But it didn