Monday, April 14, 2008 at 10:47 AM
Hubbell and I enjoying the day at our home in California. Please feel free to view my earlier post about accessibility for webmasters, as well as additional articles I've written for the Official Google blog.
One of the most frequently asked questions about Accessible Search is: What can I do to make my site rank well on Accessible Search? At the same time, webmasters often ask a similar but broader question: What can I do to rank high on Google Search?
Well I'm pleased to tell you that you can kill two birds with one stone: critical site features such as site navigation can be created to work for all users, including our own Googlebot. Below are a few tips for you to consider.
Ensure that all critical content is reachable
To access content, it needs to be reachable. Users and web crawlers reach content by navigating through hyperlinks, so as a critical first step, ensure that all content on your site is reachable via plain HTML hyperlinks, and avoid hiding critical portions of your site behind technologies such as JavaScript or Flash.
Plain hyperlinks are hyperlinks created via an HTML anchor element <a>. Next, ensure that the target of all hyperlinks i.e. <a> elements are real URLs, rather than using an empty hyperlink while deferring hyperlink behavior to an onclick handler.
In short, avoid hyperlinks of the form:
<a href="#" onclick="javascript:void(...)">Product Catalog</a>
In preference of simpler links, such as:
<a href="http://www.example.com/product-catalog.html">Product Catalog</a>
Ensure that content is readable
To be useful, content needs to be readable by everyone. Ensure that all important content on your site is present within the text of HTML documents. Content needs to be available without needing to evaluate scripts on a page. Content hidden behind Flash animations or text generated within the browser by executable JavaScript remains opaque to the Googlebot, as well as to most blind users.
Ensure that content is available in reading order
Having discovered and arrived at your readable content, a user needs to be able to follow the content you've put together in its logical reading order. If you are using a complex, multi-column layout for most of the content on your site, you might wish to step back and analyze how you are achieving the desired effect. For example, using deeply-nested HTML tables makes it difficult to link together related pieces of text in a logical manner.
The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized <div> elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result.
Supplement all visual content--don't be afraid of redundancy!
Making information accessible to all does not mean that you need to 'dumb down' your site to simple text. Making your content maximally redundant is critical in ensuring that your content is maximally useful to everyone. Here are a few simple tips:
- Ensure that content communicated via images is available when those images are missing. This goes further than adding appropriate alt attributes to relevant images. Ensure that the text surrounding the image does an adequate job of setting the context for why the image is being used, as well as detailing the conclusions you expect a person seeing the image to draw. In short, if you want to make sure everyone knows it's a picture of a bridge, wrap that text around the image.
- Add relevant summaries and captions to tables so that the reader can gain a high-level appreciation for the information being conveyed before delving into the details contained within.
- Accompany visual animations such as data displays with a detailed textual summary.
26 comments:
Thank you for the reminders.
You didn't mention Meta Tags. No need to bother with that ?
Hi, thanks for this post.
Should we (webmasters) use the Title attribute on images ? If so, what should be the difference between Alt and Title ?
It's nice to see that Google is explaining that accessible search and accessible website design go hand in hand. As an Advertising and Search Marketing company we believe very strongly that accessibility is a factor in Google's ability to successfully index and rank sites. But perhaps more importantly it gives everyone the opportunity to view, purchase from, learn and benefit from search. Designers should be designing standards compliant, accessible web sites without exception.
Julia Hyde
Creative Search Media
"The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized < div > elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result."
Care to comment any further on if you prefer CSS positioning versus tables?
The picture with you in your dog is great. Such a nice human touch that is often left out of professional post. Hubbell is beautiful. Thanks for the refresher of reality.
I know there is a link in here.
But why not take a look at my open dare to Google.
Open dare to Google: I dare you Google to include website accessibility and web standards into the main search algo and publicly say so.
http://www.ukgimp.co.uk/2008/04/15/google-should-embrace-web-standards-and-improve-the-world/
To Didier_S comment Re:
"Should we (webmasters) use the Title attribute on images ? If so, what should be the difference between Alt and Title"
I believe that alt is used for images... whereas title is used for links. (For example - if you can't avoid using "click here" as the link text, then ensure that you include a title atribute which helps add context to the link.
Question for the Google team from me about making sites accessible:
I'm a huge advocate of this and I have been for years. And to ensure I don't stray too far, I always try and consider Google from being my largest "disabled" user....
However, I have 2 issues with Google ;-) I'll explain :-)
1) Google doesn't seem to reward sites that make the efford to be accessible.
For example, I've just run a search for "holiday villas" (via the accessible search) and noticed that 7 out of the first 10 sites all use tables for layout.
Plus many of them don't make correct use of the alt and title attributes. (for example, one says "alt="spacer" quite a bit :-) )
- At a glance I would say that only 1 of them is really accessible (and before anyone asks... not it's not my site :-)
Since Google's Accessible search came out I've run several tests and I would estimate that only about 3% of the results are actually sites which are themselves "accessible".... and these sites are ranked equally well in the main Google search, so I'd be interested to know a bit more about what Google looks for in a site with regards as being "accessible"?
2) Google's "Accessible search" itself sadly isn't a great example of how to make sites accessible
(As a side issue I've tried to raise this with Google several times but it's sad to see that none of the feedback has been taken into account.)
Key examples include the fact that the results page is build with Tables - come on guys - surely Google knows that the results data is a list.... not a table ;-)
Also, it would be really useful if the results were displayed using an "ordered list" - that way, it helps "visually impaired" users stay aware of where they are in the results.
This is especially useful for users with screen maginifiers as it means that they don't need to keep moving to the top of the page each time to try and locate the page counter.
Also, users that have to magnify the screen can often loose perspective on the surrounding items so it's easy to forget where you are in the list.
As an aside....There's no reason why this feature couldn't be added to the main search as well - Yahoo does this already and from a site owners point of view, this is really useful (I like to comply with Google's wishes and NOT use an automated tool for checking my site's results.... but whereas with Yahoo it's dead easy as I can load up 100 result on one page and quickly see the results, with Google you have to manually count through the list which is just a nightmare - I suspect this is why many people still use automated tools)
Again, this has been requested as a feature for a couple of years now and still no change from Google :-(
So, whilst I love the idea of having an accessible search... I do get a bit upset when Google advises others to make their sites accessible..... and then blatantly ignores them when they do.
Kieran
I have done all this on my site yet my site is still not indexed it was for a while then it dissapeared from your search engine , what should i do next.
faro airport transfers and algarve golf bookings
Thanks for your informatiom, I want to know if i want more people to visit my blog, should i post by another URL ,or many articles under one URL ?
In response to algarvehome.com's question...
- I took a quick look at your site (both of the ones mentioned in fact) and neither are what I would consider "accessible" - the later (the golfing one) most definately not.
If you want to pop a post up on the Google Groups area I'll be happy to provide more info (I won't put it here as I don't want to digress from the original content of this post :-) )
Hi, can you take a look at this one as well.. Bitsnbobs
I'm find it hard to improve listings on Google
My home page has a PageRank 3, and for a search for "opals" my site appears after many sites which have no ranking.I wonder why and if there is really a correlation between a page ranking and the position of a site in the search results.
thank you for enlighting me.
Jacky Delarue
http://www.delarue-opals.com
Hi Lee / Jacky,
This post is specifically related to accessibility stuff, so for general "how can I get my site to rank better" it may be better to head over the to Google Groups area and stick a post up there - that way, you'll each be able to have a post dedicated to your site where I am sure you will get loads of help :-)
That said, if you have any accessibility comments relating to this post stick it up here and join in the debate :-)
Hope that helps.
K
Hi,
I would like to know what am I doing wrong in my site that my PageRank is 0?
When I first started my blog, I got a PR3 in the next update, but then it went to PR0 in the update following it?! .... I read that this was due to sponsored posts at my blog, so I added the nofollow tag to all my sponsored posts.....But still I am not getting any PageRank in many updates that followed?!
I was wondering if that could be because I posted about casinos and poker at my blog? .... please inform me if that is the case, or what am I doing wrong that is preventing me from getting a PageRank?
My Blog is: http://www.roseatemarketingtips.com/
Thanks,
Hi,
just wondering, do you confirm that we can use hyperlinks of the form:
< a href = "http://www.example.com/product-catalog.html" onclick="jàvàscript:void(...)">Product Catalog<
Because for tracking reason sometimes this kind of hyperlinks can be really usefull. Do you confimr it is crawlable as it is a < a href with an URL...
Kind regards,
Nicolas
This is a good article with a lot of great information.
I am wondering how long it will take to be indexed?
I have taken all of the steps I can think of for my Las Vegas Painting company, http://www.snvpainting.com/
what else can I do to help my site?
Very informative posting.
I think I had tried most of these but I am wondering one of my pages which is http://www.cakeamerica.com/weddingcakes.aspx is even nowhere to be found for the keyword wedding cakes. For almost a year I kept on manually looking up to the last page of the Google search results but I cannot find this page for the keyword "wedding cakes". I'll appreciate if somebody may give an advice or hint why the page is not even listed for this keyword. The page is very informative and web viewers looking for wedding cakes really love this page. This contains hundreds of wedding cake pictures with details of the cakes and information of the cake designers. Hardly you can find this type of resource with this scope, unfortunately, Google cannot find it for the keyword "wedding cakes" it's listed for keyword "weddingcakes" without space. I am just wondering hardly people will search for this keyword except people making mistakes. Maybe some tips are available out there to make this show-up in the right keyword.
Thank You!
I have an asp site. Has anyone else had this issue or noticed that on the last crawl that you got some 404 not found errors? Example I had 4 pages come back with that error (strange considering there are 100 pages all ending the same way). They end in the extention format
/type.asp?iType=104
but when I click on it in my google account on my webpage crawl page under the "not found" section it takes me to a url that ends in
/type.asp%3FiType%3D104
It seems to be adding characters to the URL.
Thanks.
Tell me what is your opinion about using both links at same time:
1. to prevent reloading page
href="#" onclick="jav...:void(...)">Product Catalog
2. for search engines but without value between NOTHING HERE
So it is fast without reloading and also search engines knows about links. Is it ok to use this?
i have add my site to google, but when i type link:kursus-blog.blogspot.com the result is no data....why...??? can u help me for this trouble...
Hello:
would you please look into the following.
Watching my logs I was surprised to observe weird, non-edxisting url being requested by your crawler. E.g.,
/index.shtml/proofs/manifesto/pythagoras/Curriculum/Games/SimpleGames/SimpleGames/evolutions.shtml
which is a combination of files and (same level directories. The corresponding file structure is this
/
index.shtml
proofs
manifesto
pythagoras
Curriculum/Games/
SimpleGames/
SimpleGames/evolutions.shtml
Besides index.shtml and evolutions.shtml, all the rest are directories.
The curious thing is that apparently the same crawler, say crawl-66-249-73-59.googlebot.com, sometimes reports as Mozilla/5.0 and sometimes Mediapartners-Google. Misparsing never occurs in its Mediapartners-Google incarnation but only when it appears as Mozilla/5.0.
This may not be a big deal, except for a wasted bandwidth and, perhaps, for getting some pages unindexed.
I've been trying to determine the source of the problem and eventually converted all my internal links to full urls, so that no parsing is needed when the crawler follows a link. Still, the result is the same.
Thank you for your time,
Alexander Bogomolny
http://www.cut-the-knot.org
Good morning,
I have a problem with indexing and therefore with adwords. I am desperate to find out if there is a negative impact of using Javascript generated content vs html generated content.
on my site www.thehalloweeenshoppe.com started a year ago I have both types of content. It seems to me that the images within the html content are indexed in google images but the images generated by java script are not.
I also have noticed that google adwords cpc is more expensive on the javascript generated pages.
Am I crazy or can anyone help me . If I am right I am more than willing to change all page content to straight html.
My name is michael and all help is appreciated.
michaelgschurmann@satx.rr.com
This may not be the best place for a question of this sort, but I haven't been able to find the answer elsewhere.
I have my blogspot site dashboard set for a short RSS feed to others. This limits the feed to ~250 characters to sites such as Google Reader, Bloglines,...
Does it also limit the amount of my content that is crawled??
Would I be better choosing full RSS feed?
I want maximum visits to the site itself.
Hi everyone,
Because several months have passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
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