Comments on SEO Sydney Blog | Search Engine Optimisation News & Jobs in Australia: Flight Center's SEO Practices shaken at SMX Sydney...

I am building an International SEO Best Practices ...

2008-06-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

I am building an International SEO Best Practices Guide - (located in the US), and was wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing some of your top tips?

Is Google.Au still #1, who is #2?
Are the basic Title, on page copy, alt tag, still very influential in the Google.Au algorithm?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Of course I will mention your site as well - if you don't mind of course.
Cheers!
Janet

Serving different content to crawlers is frowned u...

2008-05-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

Serving different content to crawlers is frowned upon yes, but I dont think serving the same content in different presentation should be penalized (cant tell from screenshot if that's the case).

I also think part of the responsibility lies with Google in not being able to index dynamic content correctly.

Thanks for you comment Webco and you are quite rig...

2008-04-20T03:27:00.000-07:00

Thanks for you comment Webco and you are quite right. Catalogues Central could be the one to 'blame' as they built and sold the solution to Flight Center and many other companies.
This could also explain why the Flight Center website has not been banned... Only the Catalogues Central section of the website has been banned.
As you mentioned, it will be interesting to see Google's response regarding Catalogues Central as it might affect more than one company.

The catalogue display technique being used by Fli...

2008-04-19T06:44:00.000-07:00

The catalogue display technique being used by Flight Centre seems to be provided by Catalogue Central (www.cataloguecentral.com.au)... who use the exact same strategy (cloaking and all) to display catalogues for a wide variety of other Aussie companies - although Flight Centre do seem a bit more agressive in adding extra text.

It looks to me like Flight Centre have "blindly" used this system - without understanding -or quite possibly even being aware of the potential cloaking issues.

Interesting to see if/when Catalogue Central are penalised.... But presumably they are scrambling to put together a technical solution which is not so spammy.

It is really intriguing why professional companies...

2008-04-17T18:01:00.000-07:00

It is really intriguing why professional companies should resort to cloaking to improve their search engine rankings when it is possible to get high rankings using the right methods.
For a website like flight center, the key would have been to improve user experience and interactivity instead of resorting to cloaking.

Obviously, Google might have felt that they contribute to the overall user experience with the vast volume of bookings made through the website, and therefore not ban it.

Justen thanks for your feedback and your help to i...

2008-04-17T02:39:00.000-07:00

Justen thanks for your feedback and your help to improve this post (that the beauty of a blog post over a newspaper article). You are right, the choice of the anchor text for the link is not the most appropriate. The word 'debate' might be better (I have made the change)

The destination page and its content is quite relevant though. What happened last week actually brought back a debate (please have a look at the comments in the SEOmoz post) produced last year by an article from The Age as a result of similar (but not identical)case that happened to the search agency you mentioned. In that sense, there is a parallel and I will keep the link.

I surely understand that the content in the linked post might not be welcomed by some. However, there is nothing personal, Justen. The post above by Tristan mentions BMW and Lastminute.com, but I sure that he has nothing against them (Do you?)... It is just that it happen to them and therefore they are mentioned. It could have happened to X, Y or Z and they would have been mentioned instead.

To be honest, I am quite sorry for them to have been fully banned, when Flight Center only seems to have been partially banned.
Now, you mentioned they have corrected their backlinks structure and have gained some rankings. It is obviously a good thing and good on them.

PS. This post will be user-generated content soon :-)

Hi Sesakebon,

I fail to see how placing a l...

2008-04-16T22:14:00.000-07:00

Hi Sesakebon,

I fail to see how placing a link on this part of your post is relevant?? "skills level in the Australian SEO industry" What Found Agency did with their previous site was nothing to do with a lack of skills, quite the contrary, I think. It seems to me you have something against them...

BTW, you might want to try Google for "seo agency" or "ppc agency" - I've checked their backlinks and looks legit to me, can you find some form of blackhat technique they've used?

Thanks for your comment Tristan. Just one thing to...

2008-04-16T03:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks for your comment Tristan. Just one thing to add to your comment.
The post does not aim at blaming the Australian SEO industry! I thought I did the opposite, but I guess my english is not as good as i thought :-)

While the Flight Center case does not mean that Australian SEOs are 'Cowboys' or 'Spammers' as you can see in some comments

It is just surprising to see that cloaking has been used on a major website. This has a bad impact on the Australian industry overseas

Regarding Google, it is quite surprising too that only a partial action has been taken, well you never know.

It was fairly recently that something similar happ...

2008-04-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

It was fairly recently that something similar happened to BMW.de and also to one of the lastminute.com brands. (UK)

It's a stretch to blame the education of Australian SEO marketers for this. This is just blatant black hat. They tried it, they got busted. It's as simple as that.

I'm disapointed that Google didn't ban them outright. I'm sure that a smaller company would be out of the index for a very long time.