In the last days, there’s has been a lot of SEO buzz about AC Hotels’s disappereance from Google listings. Last week, if we typed the commandsite:www.ac-hotels.com the response was negative: Google did not report any information about this website, while it was still on in Yahoo and MSN, although very few pages are indexed.
Today the site re-appeared in Google, with 23 pages indexed (mostly in pdf and swf files). Now, the question is: why did AC Hotels’s website disappear and re-appear from/in Google?
Let’s start with a quick look at the website: there is no track of professional search engine optimization. The site has been developed in Flash: it means that Googlebot (Google’s spider) cannot see the content, not a single word. It is like reading an empty page, which is, in fact, an ossimoro.
Nevertheless, Google can see title and metatags written in HTML, which are more or less the same for title, description and keywords, i.e. “AC Hotels: Hoteles AC en España, Italia y Portugal”. One of the basic rules for any knowledgeable SEO specialist is that the keywords in the metatags need to have a correlation with the website content (coherence) e there should be no keywords stuffing in these metatags. Looking through this specific case, it is like saying that “AC Hotels are in Spain, Italy and Portugal” without actually providing any information (content) supporting such argument: the obvious consequence is Google pushing down your rankings and overall indexing.
The several domain names owned by AC Hotels are also a problem: all have the same style (Flash, same title and metatags, no textual contents), that is plain duplicated, useless content from a Google’s perspective. Again, there is no track of search engine optimization as they are all copies of the same website, with no redirect to the main site: as a consequence Google wasn’t able to determine a central, main site within a network of duplicated domains.
In the last days, Google has probably analyzed the site and decided that, while the overall optimization was not very well executed and the website was so ill-structured to result kind of blurred to the bot, there has probably been no intentional misbehaving in cheating the spider (Googlebot). This would explain the temporary exclusion, which didn’t end up in complete banning.
At the very end, what happened to AC Hotels’s web site demonstrates that Google can penalize you not only beacuse of a website’s over-optimization, but also because no professional SEO has been involved in the website’s promotion on search engines.
In order to achieve significant results, an effective SEO strategy must involve the website’s content, optimising the texts, HTML, information distribution and site architecture in order to make the website content more visible and relevant. And now, if we type “ac hotels” in Google, we cannot find the official site: indexed, yes, butwhere?
So, the final question is: if your website does not appear in Google, does it really exist?