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.
Dealers take care where your websites are linked and with whom you are linking to. Most dealers have no idea how to determine where their websites are linked and whether there is a risk. But given the direction of Automotive SEO, you cannot afford not to know.
In the interest of providing more robust lead generation for their dealers, some automotive SEO vendors are moving into the very dangerous business of building linkfarms (large networks of linked websites). This is a seduction all webmasters flirt with sooner or later. To go over the line that search engines have drawn very clearly in the sand has grave consequences. Any SEO knows this. The question is, do the clients?
A linkfarm is a group of websites whose only purpose is to promote each other via interlinking. The quantity of links is meant to trick search engines into believing these websites are more authoritative than others in the same “theme” (Theme is a term used in the search business referring to the business category of your website as understood by the search engine. i.e. Ford dealer websites).
If your website is identified by a search engine as belonging to a linkfarm, and Google is the most sensitive, you will certainly loose significant page rank (position in the search results) and in some cases, your website may be blacklisted (deleted from the search results altogether). You’ll need to discard your domain name and start over – very expensive.
That is why quality matters. Thats why your Page Rank matters. Linking to websites with no or lower page rank will cause search engines to lower your page rank. An alert SEO will avoid linking your site to bad neighbors.
Linkfarming is a seductive path in SEO. Its like a stack of bills left on an unattended table. There is the chance no one will see you grab the cash. Do you want to go there? You’ll get away with it for a while, but linkfarm long enough and your chances of getting caught approach 100% – as seems to have already happened in this video.
Google’s webmaster Matt Cutts has mentioned that there is a threshold of about 10 interlinking sites. More than that and you could become noticed by Google as a linkfarm. A dealer with a dozen dealerships all interlinked has nothing to worry about. There are other little clues the search engines pick up on; too little content, keyword stuffing, the age of the websites as a group and the C-block of the host IP addresses.
Legitimate large dealers and even large dealer groups run no risk of having their interlinked sites perceived as linkfarms. But joining a network designed for this purpose is a risk a prudent business person will not take. Take care, and check your backlinks.
There is always something hyped. If its not Social Media, its SEO. But dealers need to know that most vendors don’t deliver on the hyped stuff. Its too new. They dont know anything about which they pitch. This video will give you an idea what passes for automotive SEO today from car dealer website vendors. In this video I take you through a typical SEO quick-check that any amateur SEO could do. What you will see does not even rate as SEO 101. There is no SEO here! (you should view in fullscreen – button is on bottom-right of video)
Maybe I’m obsessing about a small bit of text accidentally added to the website – it can happen. I’ve done it myself, proclaiming I’m the “The Best Damn Search Engine Optimization Guy”, only to delete it the next day when I realize I have much to learn – everyday. So I checked VinSolutions website and on their SEO product page http://www.vinsolutions.com/sem-seo.aspx
“VinSolutions.com provides a range of search engine marketing packages to help fit your internet budget.” And in the SEO Basic plan is a bullet “HTML Optimization” that leads me to believe that website pages are Search Engine Optimized when the “SEO powered by” line is on the dealers website. And this also leads me to believe that the dealer is paying for this (SEO). “HTML Optimization” is not exactly a term used by the SEO community. Either HTML is done according to W3C standards or its not. We’ll assume they meant something like “On-page SEO”.
But after this quick-check, maybe its me, who does not understand what SEO Basic > HTML Optimization means. Maybe the HTML is not Optimized for Search Engines. Ya think?
No matter how you slice this onion, there is no Search Engine Optimization happening on this website! Sorry VinSolutions, you just left me with nothing here. I can’t put lipstick on this pig. Pretty websites are a dime-a-dozen. Optimized websites are not.
The reader might think that I’ve uncovered one instance of proclaimed “SEO powered by…” where no SEO exists, but this is actually more commonplace than it is an aberration.
You need an SEO audit like this – if you are a dealer wondering if you are getting the SEO that you are paying for – or if you are a vendor wondering how to do SEO. Call me. I’m happy to take 15 minutes and look under the hood of your website. I’ll even make a free video of it if you like.
“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.
