Once in a while major brands get SEO right when dealing with Flash, Ajax and JavaScript. Reasons why major brands don’t think they need to care about their SEO is probably due to market share and mind share of their brand. Take American Express for example, they don’t really care if their URLs are the ugliest thing on the planet - as long as they keep on signing up business owners and members.
The biggest culprits for overkill of Flash and Ajax is probably the OEM autos. Brands like Jeep, Nissan, Mercedes Benz, Kia and more, honestly, suck at considering SEO for their corporate sites. I’m simply referring to the lack of understanding of how crawlers look at their content. Now, it is still consistent that crawlers are javascript disabled - and yes, there are instances where crawlers can crawl links/content inside javascripts.
But let’s turn off JavaScript and see what we find…
JEEP.com - by the grace of god you can still click on a few links on the site. You can still get to their sitemap in the footer. But don’t hope for much - because every other page you go to is flash driven. Any SEOs over there?
Mercedes Benz - at least they tell you that you need freaking Flash for the site to work!
And my personal favorite - Nissan USA! Forget about doing anything this site if you do not have JavaScript! This is what a crawler (javascript disabled) will see.
Google is doing quite a decent job caching the sites however. For Nissan, they actually manage to load the entire homepage. Jeep is slightly a little weaker - but Mercedes Benz loads up a wonderful loading bar…
OEMs that demonstrate awareness of search engines include a personal favorite brand of mine, Honda and another brand that a good friend of mine works for, Ford.
If you happen to turn off Javascript for Honda, you are actually presented with USEFUL links. And on top of that, those links actually go to the content pages for the vehicles - imagine that concept!
And Ford’s homepage actually allows you to scroll horizontally if you come to the site JavaScript-disabled. Quite useful and thousand times better than the experience from Jeep, Nissan or Mercedes Benz!
My buddy Justin Schoen is their guy for Ford Vehicles but my friends over at Avenue A | Razorfish (AARF) are the true heroes to making Ford.com the way it works today - so that should create excellent results for Ford’s long term search strategy. I can’t say this enough, but I get glimpse of hope when I see agencies who truly understand, embrace and share their search knowledge and experience to clients.
Wrap Up
This is more than just about SEO or search engines really. It is also relevant to user experience (or lack thereof), depending on how many people still turn off JavaScript. But as good practice, OEMs should make sure that their website work in all cases and not alienate any user.
If you are planning to build a website based on Flash to be fancy, consider these factors as you build your website so you do not end up without good search engine performance and shooting yourself in the foot. And if are head strong on using Flash, Ajax and shiznit, consider an alternate version for crawlers (I can hear some people shouting “CLOAK!!!!”), it’s not - trust me.
I’m sure there are a million reasons why certain OEMs do or do not take these things into considerations, but that’s a topic for another day.
8 Comments
I think its a simple case of not needing to rank. They do anyway. So why not make their websites fancy and pretty? That’s what sells cars, right?
We’ve done SEO for two OEMs. Brand really is king for driving results and page design. But the areas that get ignored are automotive segment keywords like compact car, crossover vehicle or mid-size car, etc.
Because they are so protective of the “brand” image and utilize the programming languages that the search engine bots can’t read they never rank for those kind of keywords. They just rely on paid search to give them the visibility they need on all keywords outside of their brand terms. It’s part of the reason why automotive is such a huge spender in paid search.
Automotive is a definite huge spender on PPC but that requires budget and when times are tough, like now, their shrinking budget for everything just doesn’t help much either for protecting their brand. But I suppose the OEMs are willing to spend more to protect their brands at all costs.
Tad is right though - the segments are all dominated by 3rd party sites like Edmunds, CarandDriver, and other content review sites. And OEMs either don’t care, don’t know how to or cannot allocate more resources to build out their content - what a shame. So much for long term internet planning.
Excellent explanation of this important issue within the automotive vertical.
This is a major sticking point with clients which employ 3rd party web dev squads and need to be educated enough about this issue in order to direct the web dev team to implement smart SEO strategies into their Flash, Ajax & JavaScript bells & whistles.
This industry will use Flash on their sites, and that won’t change for some time. So, as an agency consultant, I tend to stay away from telling the web dev team why certain techniques would benefit the client & their list of overall goals, and I keep my focus on getting the client so sure of what best practices in this area can do for them that they demand changes to the wireframes/website.
That’s the plan at least. Some OEMs still have a ways to go in being willing to accept and embrace that which can greatly benefit them in the field of SEO.
Great points mherman31,
Before my current gig, I worked at an interactive agency overseeing SEO work for the Chrysler brands. And while some clients understood the importance of SEO and their lack of market share for long tail keyword rankings against aggregate sides like Edmunds.com, CarandDriver.com, etc they rarely know where to begin - since they have their hands tied.
Of course, on the flip side you have OEMs who are headstrong on using the fanciest and flashiest application available out there. Those are the most difficult to convince. And them thinking SEO is “black magic” doesn’t help the cause either.
The real battle, I soon realized, was not on the clients side, because clients are easier to convince then internal teams in an interactive agency. But the agencies who lack the experience in developing successful SEO strategies for OEMs will almost always discount the notion that Flash is bad. Typical answers include “Google can now index Flash pages” or “Google is smart enough to figure it out.” That’s fine and dandy, but let me remind ourselves that Google took over 5 years to settle a standard for sitemaps and robots.txt files!
In a few more years, I have less doubt that Flash sites can be fully indexed and ranked, but for now, I’d definitely hope OEMs stick with the basics and not try to jump too far ahead of their time. They most probably will since most interactive agencies like the fancy stuff - but if your brand lack in SEO strategy and doesn’t rank for targeted terms like “4-door sedans” or “fuel efficient cars” - don’t blame it on your SEO. Look at who’s making the decisions for your website and I’m sure you’ll find a SEO recommendation in there somewhere that talks about using less Flash and having more content.
Hi Derek, a great post which highlights how much large automotive brands are falling foul of the benefits of incorporating SEO best practices into multi-million dollar web development projects.
What is clear to me is that automobile manufacturers are not doing enough to target the extraordinarily long consideration cycle around vehicle purchases. A little (crawlable) content goes a long way.
A correction however that the guys behind the Ford.com success are in fact Avenue A | Razorfish’s SEO and Web Development teams working together around AARF’s SOFA (Search Optimized Flash Architecture) technique. I believe Justin at Zaaz is to congratulate for his work on Ford Vehicles rather.
Hi Adam,
I stand corrected - after talking to Sean
And yes, Avenue A | Razorfish did an excellent job with Ford.com - keep up the kick ass work over there!
This is exactly the type of SEO work OEMs need and I’m glad that there are agencies out there like AARF that really understands and deliver.
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