Cobalt has resolved the issue concerning multiple Body Tags in their car dealer websites.  I published an article earlier about The Cobalt Group car dealer websites having a critical problem in their CMS (content management system) inserting Body Tags throughout the user editable text areas.  This was probably causing search engines to fail to index content properly on their website pages.    The obvious gravity of the problem got a lot of attention.  Cobalt has taken swift action to correct the problem.  I appreciate how much work is required to manage so many dealer websites, and the complexity of propagating those changes across multiple versions.

Cobalt has also changed the robot.txt file to include the reference to the sitemap.xml  file.  I still found the sitemap.xml files are still missing the XML.  And there are no Priority or Frequency Tags.

But the cleaned-up HTML should be a big help to search bots, and hopefully helping Cobalt dealers to move up a notch or two in their SERPs.

“Under-the-hood of Cobalt websites things got real scary“.  None of the content on Cobalt sites is getting properly indexed, and that spells disaster for search rank performance.

There are 2 component of an HMTL document (a web page), the Head and the Body.   The end of the body ( </body> ) signals search engines (spiders) to stop reading the web page.  Cobalt’s underlying CMS system inserts Body Tags in all the user editable fields.   “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”.  Webmaster World

Because car dealer websites tend to have very little content on them anyway, there isn’t much to index. That means SEOs must add the content to the page. 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.

I contacted Cobalt about this Body Tag problem, not wanting to write such a harsh report about a bug that seemed could be fixed momentarily.  A conversation with James Fabin, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, and Jeff Lu Sr. Product Manager SEO at The Cobalt Group assured me that they are acutely aware of the issue and hope to have the problem resolved shortly.  I will write another post when it is.

Read the full SEO Analysis Report of Cobalt

This Car Dealer Website Vendor list was posted in December 2009. It may still be useful, but for a more up-to-date list you may want to go over here Directory of Automotive SEO and Dealer Website Vendors. The list and its purpose have changed because few of these vendors offered Automotive SEO services at the time.

Due to the time required to complete SEO Analysis Reports, time does not permit regularly scheduled releases.  Please feel free to contact me if you require a specific car dealer website SEO report.