TuckerGardner's new website - "a search engine disaster" according to SEO expert Mat Barnett of MJB Data.
At first sight TuckerGardner's new website seems pretty cool and clever, and from a user's point-of-view it is. Rather than having to wade though what can feel like hundreds of pages of information the site feels more like a responsive and reactive interface, an application, designed to help the house-hunter track down her pray with relentless efficiency, so why "disaster"?
Okay, perhaps it's not the end of the world, but from an SEO, (search engine optimisation), perspective the new www.tgresidential.com is a disaster and might as well not feature any content at all. As web-development practices and browsers have evolved over the past decade or so there have been an number of de rigeur advances that have eventually been largely abandoned by people running commercial websites. Splash-pages, frame-sets, JavaScript, Flash, session-cookies and fancy drop down menus could, and still can, easily ruin a website's potential for attracting free traffic from the major search engines like Google and MSN.
"So what?" you might be thinking at this point. Businesses that have been around and been successful for some years often don't really care about being found in search engines for anything other than their company name. However, one of the best advantages that search engines have over traditional marketing is their low-cost national and international reach. Unless you're engaged in national or international advertising, people in other towns, cities and countries won't know what your company name is and won't be searching for it.
The amount of potential customers you might miss by blocking search engines is difficult to guess. Perhaps it's not a lot, but why miss any? Google, which represents around 70% of the UK search market, will gather and index your content for free, if you let it, as will MSN and most others.
TuckerGardner don't need to scrap or change their new fancy interactive online search application. All they need to do is publish their content in a reasonably search-engine-friendly way as well as through their new map-widget. There's nothing wrong with a dual version approach, and there's a great deal of overlap between search engine optimisation and accessibility these days and providing a second version of a website's content that can be accessed by screen-readers and mobile devices can usually take care of 90% of all SEO issues as well.
See for yourself. Go to www.mjbd.co.uk and type 'http://www.tgresidential.com' into the little content-checking widget that I've hastily put together to accompany this article to get an idea of what robots can see. You should find that there are a few properties that you can get to, but the substantial bulk of the listings just aren't there. While you're there why not enter your own website's address and see if you can see your copy?