Blankness is Bad for SEO

Most website owners crave traffic from the preeminent search engine of our times, Google, and work very hard to achieve it.

And they should. Diligence, perseverance, and superhuman industriousness are needed to rank well in competitive niches.

Yet hard work based on ignorance doesn't help much at all. Even superhuman hard work doesn't help if funamental mistakes have been made.

Here's an example of a fundamental mistake: a blank website.

That's right, a website which is completely devoid of content. Not surprisingly, it won't rank for anything, no matter how many articles you write, no matter how many directories you submit to, no matter how many backlinks you obtain.

But who would put up a blank website?

Well, lot's of people, especially ecommerce netrepreneurs.

Of course, the website isn't blank to the human eye. There's a header, some nifty widgets on the side, and numerous listings of items for sale at eBay and Amazon.

But search engines disregard all this. The header isn't text content, so that's ignored. The widgets are rendered in Javascript, and aren't visible to search engines. The listings may or may not be Javascript, but they are piped from eBay or Amazon, and the content resides on the mother site. The content on the blank website is like a hologram - a replica.

If the coding is very good, it is indistinguishable from content embedded into the site, but it's still duplicate content, which makes the site useless. In most cases, the coding isn't good, because sites like eBay and Amazon aren't interested in helping you rank well in the search engine results. And all the listings are very clearly not resident on the ecommerce site.

To make sure you aren't serving blank content to search engines, use an analysis tool, such as the superlative Qirina. This tool allows you to not just see the content of a site the way a search engine would see it, but analyzes it as well.

If the Qirina analysis thinks your niche could be "privacy policy" then you probably have a problem. Similarly, if on the basis of a keyword analysis Qirina concludes that your site is about "spongebob squarepants" even though you are in the business of selling cat food, then you should probably cut back on cartoon-related posts.

Always make sure your hard work is building on knowledge and real expertise. Use the right tools to make sure you aren't making critical mistakes.