The worst linking in the world - ever!

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I just came a cross this new client and was chocked to see how the webagency had designed the navigation scheme for their new site (due for release next week!). I am not going to mention the name of the site as I have no intention of embarrasing anyone but I think we can all learn from the study of really bad linking.

Anyway, the way the linking works is like this ...
There are absolutely no regular links anywhere on the site. In other words, the links on the site is not pointing to specific files on the server but instead trigger an OnClick event that fires a very complex client side JavaScript that by the end submits a POST form! All pages are pulled from the same template file, so essentially this site only have one page: default.asp There is no way to create any "deep links" and, off course, no way any spider can crawl this site.


If you have any examples that are worse than this one, please post it here. When evaluating new sites and clients I find it very usefull to be familiar with mistakes done by others and I never saw a linking scheme as bad as the one above.

[David Wallace]

I had a client that had a similar issue - a JavaScript navigational structure and the JS was called for externally. Only the home page of the site was listed in the search engines. The site contained about 10 sections with a few pages connected with each section so a set of text links to each section in the footer and then a site map with text links to every page solved the crawling problems.

I have another current client where the home page requires a zip code to be entered to not only load the remaining dynamic contents of the home page but to access the rest of the site as well. Again we developed a site map with text links and placed a link to it on the home page. The actual link to the home page on the site map contains a default zip code in the URL so that the search engines can crawl the entire contents of the home page as well as the rest of the site.

[rustybrick]

Way too funny. All files in one document. That is some really old school (hmm) childish, coding.

[seomike]

That's got to be hell to manage if it isn't consistant through out the site. Is it tied in with click tracking???

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

That's got to be hell to manage if it isn't consistant through out the site. Is it tied in with click tracking???

No, actually it is completely automated - very smooth ... crap :)
- and no, it is not tied to any tracking - that comes on top of everything ...

They are still missing out a few important elements to win the Grand Prize (of bad/no SEO): If they had framed the site and published all text in Flash that would have made it :rolleyes:

[DianeV]

A few years ago, I saw a site for which the URLs were all run out of the cgi-bin; the site itself was very clearly in a subfolder of the designer. Of course, the "designers" were programmers who were clearly superior to anyone billing herself as a "web designer" and didn't want to listen to anyone or anything.

[Robert_Charlton]

Last year I looked at a site for a prominent company that was one giant Flash page that scrolled horizontally... As I remember, you could either scroll it with the bottom scroll bar or click arrows that intermittently appeared along the way.

When I asked several designers to take a look, most of them couldn't actually download it.

I should add a PS to this... that many sites I see, including many in the SEM area, won't load anything if Active-X is disabled.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

LOL yes, pure one-file-flash sites - especially if yu can't even download them - works really well too :)