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I'm new to the forums, so sorry if this has been posted before. I work for a leading tourism site and some of the keywords we are ranking highly for are bringing up text only pages on the search engines. The only way around this I can think of is to use a redirect to the home page of the graphical site, but I know redirects are sometimes frowned upon by the search engines. Does anyone have any views on this or similar experiences?
Thanks in advance.
Sarah
How about a link directing the visitor to your home page?
or
Change those pages so they are not text only.
using a 'illegal' javascript redirects is what caused BMW.de to get banned from Google [webmasterworld.com] so I wouldn't do it.
What type of information does the page's hold? why is it in text format - do you have the same informtaion available on your site in 'graphical' format? Is the page ending in a .txt or is it the 'text-only' version of your site that ranks well?
A link at the top of your text document could do the trick if you already have the info somewhere else on the site - although I don;t think that the link would 'link' if it's a .txt document.
'Dressing up' the page might be a good idea if you don't already have the info available but it might be a bit more risky depending on how well you can optimise the page's code.
It's the pages from the text only version of the graphical site that are appearing, which i guess makes sense in many ways because they are so text heavy but they don't look good when you click through.
then an obvious button to the graphical pages should do the trick and not hinder too much on your conversion rates.
It seems accessibility is a double edged sword!
Text only pages and printer-friendly pages are in the same league: they are 'redundant'. If you design your site and separate content from style (HTML and CSS) and set up another stylesheet for print, you no longer need text-only and printer-frienldy pages. This makes it maintaining your site A LOT easier as you only maintain one version and not three.
Have a look and ask any questions you like on this brand new WebmasterWorld forum about accessibility and usability. [webmasterworld.com]
To learn how to design pages in CSS and how to use the print stylesheet visit the WebmasterWorld CSS forum [webmasterworld.com]
Hope this helps.
It's the pages from the text only version of the graphical site that are appearing, which i guess makes sense in many ways because they are so text heavy but they don't look good when you click through.
Sarah - The text content on the text-only and the text and graphics pages should be essentially the same. The addition of graphics shouldn't be changing that.
So Google is probably treating these sets of pages as dupe pages. In the case of dupes, generally (but not always) Google drops the page with the lower PageRank.
Assuming you prefer the pages with images, either you need to use a CSS solution, as suggested, or you will need to block the text only versions from spidering.
Before making any changes, do a lot of checking about why these text only pages are outperforming the same pages with graphics. Check navigation paths, Toolbar PageRank, and backlinks. Search unique content strings to see what is and is not indexed. Look at the site in Copyscape to see if both versions show up.
Most important, make sure your text and graphic pages will rank, and figure out why they're now underperforming, so that you aren't handicapping yourself.
Sounds like you might have some basic navigation and structural issues that may be distorting your PageRank distribution... or else it may be that your pages with graphics are so slow that your pages with images are simply less popular than the same pages without.
If you've gotten some good inbound links to your text only pages, the problem will be more difficult to solve.
