I was doing a bit of research on a potential client’s website the other day… and it turns out that Google doesn’t attribute any keywords to the site — it’s invisible to Google. Google has crawled their site and all of their pages, but because of the way the site was coded and the way text appears on the site visually, it’s not readable by Google. A good portion of the traffic coming to any website is from search engines, especially if you’re just getting started. Being invisible to Google can make it difficult to get any traffic.
What Does It Mean to Be Invisible to Google?
Ok, so Google doesn’t attribute any keywords to your site — what’s that mean exactly? It means that your site will not show up for any searches done on Google. It also means that you’ll have a difficult time paying for traffic via Google AdWords, because the algorithm there uses keywords on your site to determine the relevance — and therefore position — of your ads. In other words, people aren’t going to find your site through a search engine.
What Causes Invisibility to Google?
There can be many reasons your site isn’t visible to Google. You may have a Flash site which isn’t coded properly to let Google see any content. You may have text as images instead of text (Google can’t read text in images). The way your site is coded may make it impossible for Google to see the text. Lots of different reasons, which usually are specific to your site.
How Do I Know if My Site is Invisible to Google?
There are a number of ways to find out what Google thinks of your website. Here are some tools to try:
- View Source – If you view the source of your website, what text shows up? This may be a bit difficult if you’re not used to looking at html, but it can give you a lot of clues.
- Google Analytics – Are you getting any traffic from search engines in your traffic sources report? Are you getting any traffic via keywords (under traffic sources)?
- Google WebMaster Tools – What keywords does Googlebot associate with your website? What keywords does your site show up with? Does it show up for any keywords?
- Google AdWords Keywords Tool – This tool will give you keyword ideas for your website. If none or few show up, you have a problem.
- SEOQuake plugin – Browse around your site and use the keyword density report tool on various pages to see what keywords show up. Available for Firefox, Chrome & Safari.
- Website Grader – Put your website into the grader and see what suggestions it makes — good for insights on what to fix.
- WooRank – Another site where you can put your website in to get suggestions — mostly related to SEO, so a very good resource for fixing issues with invisibility with Google.
How Do I Fix My Site?
Good question. My suggestion is to get help from someone who really knows SEO. Ask your own web designer about the problem and see what they say. They may have overlooked something. Or you may have an older website which was coded in a way that’s not used anymore. Just make sure you do something. Being invisible to Google is pretty much the same as not having a website at all.
Thoughts?
Do you have other tools you use to look at SEO for a website? Other suggestions for checking keywords and visibility? Please share!
(photo by mattw1ls0n)