"Text Only" Copy of Entire Site

Accessibility vs perceived spam

[anallawalla]

I don't see them much these days other than on government sites here in Australia, but there are many sites that offer a "text only" option so that people who use Lynx or a reader don't have to battle through alt tags or the lack of convenient navigation aids.

What is the situation with regard to search engines perceiving this as duplication of content, therefore spam?

What are people using to generate such text-only pages for a large site?

- Ash

[trismegisto]

Hi anallawalla

I don’t know if search engines will interpret this as spam, but maybe if the only backlinks to the “text only” pages are named like: “text only”, the SE will “know” that it is not spam; but i think that is very unprobable; so, why don’t you just block robots access with a meta tag?:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
or with .htaccess?

Hope it helps.

trismegisto

[benihana]

text only versions are a good idea for a number of reasons.

text only browsers (as already mentioned) and screen readers will find them a lot easier to deal with. also for printing pages they can be much more convienient.

IMHO they might help search engines, as the content is much 'purer', i.e. not having lots of tags scripts etc to wade through to get to the meat.

In the case of large sites theres a good chance they will be database driven, and therefore a text only page just requires calling the relevent info from the db without having to worry about formatting etc