TK Carsites SEO Analysis Report

Burnsville Toyota is the TK Carsites example in this Comparison of car dealer websites

Indexation Comparison for TK Carsites SEO Analysis

The following focuses on the tangible mechanics of TK dealer websites. Much of SEO may be an art, but the foundation of a website is not. A car dealer website vendor should deliver a product that is compatible with how major search engines work. We measure those attributes that indicate how compliant TK websites are with search engine conventions published by Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

How a website gets indexed by these search engines is a primary indicator of compliance. If a search engine cannot see the pages in the website, it may indicate an architectural problem. An analysis of other sites built by the same vendor will illustrate this for us.

The TK dealer website of Burnsville Toyota indexes very pooly. This analysis is not conclusive because TK employs an unusual technique; using multiple domains within 1 website. The competing dealer sites here use one domain per dealership, which is normal, and index accordingly. (except Rudy Luther Toyota City, which suffers from some of the same technique we explore here) TK uses many domains for each dealership, wrapped into one website making measuring the overall website performance difficult. (future research will take this into account)

DealerComp is currently tracking the TK websites listed in the table below.

Scores are relative on a scale of 10 = Best, 1 = Worst

• TK websites use very unconventional Robots.txt file methods. Oddly some sites redirect the Robots.txt file to the root (home page). This is unique and probably definitely bad for SEO, since the Robots.txt file is used by search engines to locate the Sitemap.xml file. A score of 1 = worst is given if either no Robots.txt file is present or it is redirected. The Robots.txt files we did find, had no pointer to the Sitemap.xml file. This added to the low scores.
• TK websites have the same unconventional redirect method for Sitemap.xml files. A sitemap.xml tells search engines how to navigate the pages of the website. It is considered good SEO and is recommended by Google and other search engines. The Sitemaps.xml files we did encounter were not complete, only pointing to a few URLs, with no priority rank, frequency, etc.
• Indexed Pages are reported by Google on 11/10/2009. The overall indexing of TK websites are extraordinarily poor. Many automotive dealer websites have more than 500 pages indexed. Poor indexation is probably a result of the previously mentioned SEO deficiencies concerning Robots.txt files and Sitemap.xml files and the use of multiple domains.

• W3C Scores are a mixed bag. Some TK dealer websites had a perfect 100% score, which is very rare, while others scored poorly with significant errors. Some TK sites had no canonical control (see Google’s canonical explanation). Also lacking is character declaration. Character declaration is not a critical omission. W3C explanation why character declaration is increasingly important. It seems TK has no internal housekeeping policies that would cause these issues to be more uniform over all their dealer websites.
• URL Score reflects how much page content is in the URL, indicating how search engine friendly they are. Today this seems to be an increasingly critical attribute to getting good page rank on search engines. TK URLs scored very poorly. TK page URLs are not search engine friendly for two reasons; new inventory pages are query strings and used inventory pages are iframed. There is little for a search engine to index on these pages and there is nothing to be found in the URL. Read more about SEO friendly URL formation.
• These pages are mostly Flash, further exacerbating the indexing of pages due to a lack of content (text – information search engines can read).
• TK websites have multiple H1 tags which have generic keywords. TK default H tags are sub-par. See DealerComp H Tag best practices.
• TK websites have very few images as a result of the all Flash design. Often there is only one image with an Alt tag for TK-logo. This is a bad branding practice and poor SEO, causing search engines to identify the dealer’s web pages with TK rather than the name of the dealership.

TK websites Indexation vs. Inbound Link Comparison.

Overall Analysis

TK websites get indexed very poorly and yet they consistently get good SERP position. As seen in the above table, TK sites have an extraordinary number of inbound links. This correlation is very unusual and points to an off-site SEO strategy called link building. While link building is the #1 influence on page rank (especially with Google), and something every SEO should be doing, this is also an area in which the borders can quickly blur between good SEO and Black-Hat SEO techniques.

DealerComp tracked down one of the sites referring traffic to Burnsville Toyota to find the site www toyotainthenew com. (dots removed to prevent linking to the site) TK even promotes this site in demos, unaware that this site has been given a PR = 1 by Google and may be nearly blacklisted (however, it is still in Google’s index). Try searching for “Toyota in the News” on Google and you will not find the site in the Google SERP. Google probably considers this site to be a ‘link farm” and sites linked to it could be at great risk of also having their PR downgraded to a 1, or worse, Blacklisted. This practice is a violation of Google Terms. TK is pushing the envelope of SEO and may find itself at the sharp-end of a Google decision one day.

TK also uses an unorthodox multiple-domain method (a different domain name for each page) – an interesting strategy designed to increase the number of dealer pages in the SERP (since only one URL per website is usual). For example, the “parent domain” is www.burnsvilletoyota.com, while on the website navigation, Credit and Finance, brings up a separate domain within the same website (www.burnsvilletoyotaminneapoliscarloans.com). This is an attempt to monopolize the SERP by having each domain take up another spot on the SERP. This does not seem to work as well as one might think. Some basic searches put Burnsville Toyota at the top of the SERP every time and www.burnsvilletoyotausedcarsminneapolis.com consistently got first page placement, but always below the fold. The other Burnsville domains did not get onto the first page of the SERP. While this strategy may work to increase visitors by a (not great) margin, this may prove to be a foolish SEO strategy should it result in backlash from search engines, since it is, in spirit, a violation of Google’s Terms.

Using multiple domains for the same dealership dilutes search engine page rank for several reasons; it confuses the search engine’s attempt to identify a business (a relatively new endeavor by search engines) and it dissipates the value of the traffic that would otherwise be attributed to a domain. Alexa measures traffic rank per domain and that rank infuences other search engine page rank.

A few dealers are doing some on-site SEO, but the chances of being SERP competitive are slim when competing with a state-of-the-art dealer website because TK architecture is not competitive. Alt tags and H tags are poorly implemented. Instead, TK seems to rely entirely on off-site SEO and domain tricks to produce visitors and leads. This has the potential to be derailed at any moment. Dealers using TK could be at risk of losing page rank, and with that, all visitors and leads, overnight should Google decide to take a close look at these practices.

DealerComp only lists attributes that are clearly the responsibility of the vendor. Unlike other Automotive SEO reports, DealerComp does not consider search engine rank to be the sole responsibility of the vendor – rather it is a dealer responsibility to see that proper keyword selection and implementation are executed. DealerComp filters out keyword selection that might influence the results of this particular analysis.

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