Cobalt SEO Analysis Report (The Cobalt Group)

Barrier Motors and Toyota Sunnyvale are the Cobalt examples in this Comparison of car dealer websites. However, these two examples are clearly different from the rest of the sample websites in this report. It seems that there are two versions of Cobalt websites. Most dealers have the older version. However, even the newer website design uses the same old CMS that plagues the SEO capabilities of all Cobalt websites.

DealerComp is currently tracking these Cobalt websites

The following grapic illustrates indexation of web pages, or how well Cobalt Dealer Websites get indexed by the four major search engines. Indexation is the first step in discovering how compliant Cobalt websites are with search engine conventions published by Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Cobalt Web Page Indexation Sample Jan. 2010

Cobalt websites get indexed consistently. Cobalt sites are fairly reporting pages to the bots with no duplicate content. That’s a minor advantage against some other designs. Curiously the newer Cobalt websites seem to have little indexing edge over the old design. I see newer designs producing 3,000+ pages (mostly duplicate content that is bad for SEO, but that’s not the story here)

• Cobalt sites get consistent and realistic indexing due to the always present Sitemap.xml. But the Sitemap.xml file has no priority or frequency attributes.
• A rudimentary Robot.txt file is also always present. However, the Robots.txt file is missing the pointer to the Sitemap.xml file. At least the search engines seem to find all the pages on these sites. These are pluses for Cobalt, by comparison to other vendors analyzed at this site. But because these are quick fixes, this is no great compliment.
• W3C Scores are poor. Cobalt sites have an above average number of minor errors. There are no critical errors, but these too could be dealt with. Cobalt sites also lack character declaration. Character declaration is not a critical omission. W3C explanation why character declaration is increasingly important.

Multiple Body Tags are the downfall of Cobalt SEO Capability

Under-the-hood things got real scary. None of the content (maybe just a small percentage of content and the Alt Tags) on Cobalt sites is getting properly indexed, and that spells disaster for search rank performance.

The CMS underlying Cobalt’s system is the culprit. In this article at webmaster world other webmasters and website developers encounter problems like this all the time, but they fix them.

“This will disrupt any spidering” which will cause most content on the page to be rendered useless and result in “a whole bucket of woe” – for SEO purposes.

Because dealer websites tend to have very little content on them anyway, there isn’t much to index. That means we SEOs must add the content. But because the spider is likely to stop at the first Body Tag, that’s real bad news for you SEOs that are editing your Cobalt dealer website expecting to get some improvement in search results. You are wasting your time.  You may be thinking, I’ll just place all my content in the first Body element.  But if you inspect your source code, you will probably find that the Cobalt CMS is inserting Body Tags in the H Tags as well (illustrated below), which means the first H Tag is where the spider stops – long before it gets to your content.  Best case, a few Alt Tags and 1 H Tag get indexed.

http://www.blossomchevy.com/

Empty H Tags and Body Tags

Cobalt could fix this by editing the scripting tool so that it uses a Page Tag instead of a Body Tag in each area that is user editable. Page Tags could be substituted to serve the same purpose, and that is a more conventional practice.

http://www.kingsvw.com/

Multiple Body Tags and H Tags

There are 27 Body Tags on this home page and there is a tendency for the CMS to produce an abundance of   (placeholders) instead of spaces. Although   may not disrupt search rank ability, they can’t be helping when in an H tag. And that is moot because of the Body Tag likely renders the H Tag useless.

Barrier Motors SEO H-Tags

Both example sites Barrier Motors and Toyota Sunnyvale have Body Tags before all that nice content and the neatly crafted H Tags created with SEO clearly in mind. To test that these H Tags and content are not getting spidered and indexed, I used Barrier’s H Tags to search for them. With the obvious care with which this site is optimized, it is very surprising that in each case, Barrier did not rank in the top spot for Seattle Volvo or Seattle Audi or Seattle Mercedes-Benz, and sometimes they ranked 4th! A site with such carefully crafted Meta Tags and contents, as this site is, should be #1 for each of those H Tag searches. Cobalt’s website design is broken and obsolete. No level of on-site SEO expertise can help make these sites perform optimally against a well-made competing website.

• Cobalt sites do not have search engine friendly URLs. An optimized website needs URLs that reflect something of the page contents. Today this seems to be an increasingly critical attribute to getting good page rank on search engines. Cobalt URLs scored very poorly. There is nothing in the URL helping SEO. re. Although Bill Estes site performed well in this comparison of Cobalt dealer websites, the URL is representative. http://www.billesteschevy.net/?http://billesteschevrolet.vinmanagersites.com/AdvancedSearch2.aspx?InventoryType=U is not search engine friendly. It has an uneccessary redirect embedded – a big SEO no-no. And the inventory page; http://billesteschevrolet.vinmanagersites.com/AutoDetails2.aspx?ID=3969369 would not tell you that is a 2006 Audi A4 2.0T Quattro.
• Cobalt websites have too many images. More than 4 images can slow page load times and cause a confusing experience. Some Cobalt sites had more than 40 images – many more than most dealer websites. In most cases 50% of the images had empty Alt Tags. But those that did have descriptions, had very good keyword selections. Some of those may be helping Cobalts SEO performance quiet a bit. Compared to other recent analysis reports on car dealer websites SEO, other vendors have fared worse. But then we aren’t shooting for 50%!
• Only the Meta Tags have SEO capability. Cobalt relies entirely on the Meta Tags to communicate page SEO information to search engines without URLs or content available to SEO.
• Code-to-Content Ratio: Producing lively websites can have a detrimental effect on your code-to-content ratio and Cobalt puts a lot of JavaScript in the Header that makes their sites lively. Using JavaScript is better than Flash, but with too little content on the page the extra code on Cobalt pages really plagues these websites with a high code-to-content ratio.

I have worked with Cobalts Motorplace back-end and found it to be one of the more difficult to use. It seems to disagree with most browsers, causing it to hang – and sometimes that means lost work.  On the other hand Cobalt’s customer support is very good.  For a dealer/webmaster making changes, the service process is attentive and well organized.

Overall Analysis

Cobalt websites work and they are pleasing to the eye, but that is not what this analysis is about.  Cobalt sites come with very little initial content and rely on templated Description and Keyword Meta Tags to do all the SEO heavy-lifting.  Cobalt websites do not have sound infrastructure, primarily due to the underlying CMS application. This prevents most bots from accurately spidering and indexing the websites, seriously handi-capping a dealer’s SEO – search rank ability. Until this CMS-Body Tag issue is remedied, SEO specialists will not want to get involved with a dealer using a Cobalt websites if they can help it. The only things a professional SEO might do to help a dealer with an existing Cobalt website is put all your eggs in off-site search engine marketing.

Analysis by DealerComp.com – Best of Automotive SEO reports compiled by request.